Over the last six weeks, I’ve mostly been talking about Christianity, which is a huge subject in itself. But some of the Christian ideas about God I’ve mentioned, especially in the first week, are similar to ideas which would be found in other faiths. So it’s time now, in the final talk, to look beyond Christianity. To ask about the similarities and differences between the main religions of the world. And to explore the ways in which people of other faiths can seek to understand each other.

So first of all, I shall attempt to give a quick overview of the beliefs of the largest religions of the world, including giving a few historical details of their relationship with Christianity. And then I’ll look in more depth at the issue of how religions can relate to each other.

The Abrahamic religions

Christianity is the world’s largest religion, followed by Islam. And their memberships together comprise more than half of the world’s population. They’re often grouped together with Judaism, which is about 100 times smaller than either. And they are the three Abrahamic religions. All believe in one God who created the cosmos, and all claim a direct lineage of faith going back to the patriarch Abraham. There’s much which connects them, but their shared belief in the one God of the patriarchs is modified in different ways. Judaism believes that there’s one God and that Israel is his people. Christianity believes that there’s one God and that Jesus Christ is his Son. And Islam believes that there’s one God and that Muhammad is his prophet. In each case, the second aspect of the faith gives a distinctive angle on how God himself is understood.

Judaism

It seems logical to begin with Judaism, even though the number of Jews is tiny compared with the membership of the other faiths I’ll be talking about today. Both the New Testament and the Qur’an refer extensively to the Hebrew scriptures, often mentioning figures such as Adam, Abraham and Moses. Both Christianity and Islam share and value much of the story of the people of Israel. Jewish people have made remarkable contributions to the history of western civilisation. But much of the world’s awareness of the content of Judaism comes through the eyes of those two other, much larger faiths.

It’s hard therefore for me, as a Christian theologian, to give any kind of fair account of how Jews understand their own faith. For I’m firmly in the habit of giving a Christian interpretation of what Christians call the Old Testament. But I’ll have a go.

In the Book of Genesis, God calls Abraham in his old age to leave his home and to go on a long journey to a new land. A land where he is to become the father of a great nation. And God says that through him all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Judaism is therefore the religion of a particular people, who trace their ancestry back to Abraham. It’s traditionally understood that anyone with a Jewish mother is thereby Jewish. The Book of Exodus tells how God rescues Abraham’s descendants from slavery in Egypt, led through the desert by Moses. God makes a covenant at Mount Sinai with the people, and eventually leads them to capture and settle in the promised land.

So Judaism is the religion of a people, descendants of Abraham’s son Isaac. And the religion of a Law, the Torah, revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai. And it became the religion of a place, the land of Israel, centred on Jerusalem. The holy city where a magnificent Temple was built, and where a complex system of animal sacrifices was conducted.

But the land of Israel at its greatest was still only about the size of Wales. And the story of the Jewish people was always one of being threatened from all sides by mighty empires from Africa, Europe and the Middle East. The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greek and the Romans. The Jewish history told in the Hebrew scriptures includes the period of slavery in Egypt and the exile in Babylon. It strongly emphasises that God is the one who delivered them from slavery in Egypt, the event which is still celebrated in the annual festival of the Passover.

In AD 70, a failed revolt against the Romans led to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Just at the time when Christianity was becoming a religion separate from Judaism, so the Jewish faith itself underwent a great change. There were no more animal sacrifices, because there was no Temple. And the Jews came to live in scattered communities across Europe, without their traditional geographical focus. Without their shared traditional place of pilgrimage. But now with a religious life centred on synagogues and the reading of their scriptures, and on the life of households and families.

Jews spent most of the last twenty centuries living in Christian countries, facing varying degrees of persecution. The two faiths continued to develop side by side, with some degree of influence on each other. But Jews experienced much anti-Semitism from Christians. And Christians mostly assumed a belief that the Church had replaced the Jews as the new Israel, and that God’s previous covenants with the Jews no longer applied.

The 20^th century brought the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust, in which six million of the Jews in Europe were systematically murdered by the Nazis. Astonishingly, this tragedy was followed by the foundation of the modern state of Israel. After 19 centuries, the Jews returned to the historic land of their faith. And so, after a long history in Europe, most Jewish people today live in Israel or in the United States. One of the most impressive aspects of their way of life is this ability to preserve a very strong sense of their identity through many centuries of persecution and exile.

The Holocaust caused Christians to re-examine the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Christians realised to their shame how much the Church’s many centuries of anti-Semitism had paved the way for Hitler’s genocide. After the Second World War, both Protestants and Catholics began to relate much more sympathetically to the Jewish people. Christians began to reemphasise the idea the Jews were the original people of God, and that God’s covenant with them remained valid. Jewish scholars have responded warmly to this change of heart, and have affirmed that Jews and Christians are worshipping the same God and have much in common.

Nevertheless, there are many differences between the two faiths. The Christian doctrines of the Trinity and of the divinity of Christ appear baffling or idolatrous to Jews, who emphasise the unity of the one God. Christianity’s emphasis on individual salvation leading to eternal life is also not a dominant theme within Judaism. The resurrection of the dead is only briefly mentioned in the last of the Hebrew scriptures, the books of the Christian Old Testament. Jews do not primarily see the Torah as something to obey in order to get to heaven, even though Christians have often assumed that they did. Jews see their Law as the authentic expression of their identity as God’s people. They are Jewish, and therefore this is how they live.

Over the centuries, Jews have developed very detailed descriptions of how to keep the Torah. These include rules about kosher food and about keeping the Sabbath holy. But there are many different kinds of Jews who have histories in different parts of Europe. And today’s Jews include both the Orthodox Jews and Reform Jews. Orthodox Jews try to preserve a very traditional understanding of Judaism. Reform Judaism, which has developed over the last two centuries, believes that Jewish traditions can be adapted to fit the context and the intellectual challenges of the modern world.

Islam

And next on to Islam. Mohammad lived from 570 to 632, and is considered by Muslims to be the last and greatest of the prophets, the restorer of the true monotheistic faith of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Muslims believe that God had previously revealed himself in the Law of Moses, in the Psalms of David and in the Gospel of Jesus. But they believe that the texts owned today by Jews and Christians are corrupted versions of the original revelations. Only the Qur’an, in Arabic, is the true word of God, dictated to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel over a period of 23 years.

It’s a strange experience reading a translation of the Qur’an as a Christian. It reads as a set of prophetic messages which repeatedly refer to people, events and themes which are very familiar from the Old and New Testaments. The Qur’an often mentions Jews and Christians, sometimes called People of the Book. But the events described in the Qur’an are not told in a systematic order, and they are sometimes confusingly different from the Bible.

The Qur’an says that Jesus’ mother Mary was a virgin, and had received the news of her miraculous pregnancy from the angel Gabriel. But the Qur’an vigorously rejects any belief in his divinity or in the doctrine of the Trinity. Jesus brings the Gospel, but is not crucified. However, he does ascend into heaven.

From a Jewish or Christian perspective, it appears that Mohammad had heard various Jewish and Christian ideas from people living near him, and that he used them in the writing of the Qur’an. From a Jewish or a Christian perspective, the Qur’an seems to reuse rather inaccurately a number of themes from the Jewish and Christian scriptures. From a Muslim perspective, the Qur’an corrects the mistakes made by the Jews and the Christians. From a Jewish and Christian perspective, Islam contains significant errors; but it is still closer to the truth than the mixture of worship of different gods and idols which it replaced among the tribes of Arabia. From a Muslim perspective, the message of the Qur’an restores for everyone the true understanding of God as he had been worshipped by Adam, Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus.

I mentioned that Judaism tends to emphasise judgement and eternal life less than Christianity. But Islam is in the other direction. The Qur’an repeatedly issues fierce warnings about the impending day of judgement. And it offers a very clear vision of the horrors of everlasting punishment and the delights of eternal paradise. Judgement is very thorough in Islam with the promise of a detailed divine enquiry into all a person’s deeds. But God is described both as merciful and as just. And the Qur’an says that paradise is open to all who believe in God and in the last day and who do good, including Jews and Christians.

• Islamic belief can be summarised as having five pillars, which are as follows:
• The belief that there is only one God and that Mohammad is his prophet.
• The five sets of daily prayer, facing towards Mecca
• The practice of charitable giving
• Fasting, especially during Ramadan
• And the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Islam means submission to God. It’s a practical faith which emphasises obedience to God, following the commandments revealed in the Qur’an.

I described two weeks ago how most of the divisions between Christian denominations involve disagreements about how the Church should be governed, because the New Testament doesn’t clearly settle the matter. And there’s a rather similar pattern in Islam. Muslims have disagreed about the extent to which Mohammad can be seen to have authoritative successors. The largest group, the Sunnis, emphasise the handing on of traditions and the seeking of consensus. But the smaller group, the Shias, also emphasise a series of authoritative imams from the centuries following Mohammad.

Islam was a political and military movement from the beginning. Mohammad led armies and united tribes under his leadership. The expansion of Islam as a religious and political force has sometimes brought it into conflict with the Christian Church and with those nations where Christianity was established by the state. Islam came to dominate the areas of north Africa which had previously been Christian. And long and bitter conflicts were fought during the Middle Ages in Spain and in the Holy Land between Muslims and Christians, including the Crusaders. Yet Christianity and Islam have often been able to coexist peacefully, as is mostly the case today.

There are today many examples today of religious dialogue between Muslims and Christians. Many moderate Moslems and Christians have tried very hard to overcome the fears and divisions caused by the minority of Muslims who support terrorism.  For example, a large group of Muslim leaders and scholars signed an open letter to their Christian counterparts in 2007 called ‘A Common Word between Us and You.’  The letter emphasises the beliefs which Christians and Muslims have in common, and calls for mutual respect, peace and the shared goal of loving God and loving our neighbours.

So Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the three Abrahamic faiths, held by over half of the world’s population. They arise from the Middle East, and share a complex interconnected history.

Hinduism

Now I’ll move further east to talk briefly about Hinduism, the third largest religion in the world. Hinduism is extremely diverse and is impossible to summarise. It might be more accurate to talk about the religions of India, rather than to give the misleading impression that there is one clearly defined creed. Arguable, Hinduism only came to be seen as a united religion in itself in response to pressure from Muslims and then from Christians who were seeking to spread their own faiths.

The roots of the religious texts of Hinduism go back three or more thousand years. But there’s no central figure and no single founder, and there are a variety of significant texts. There’s no hierarchy which can define doctrine or excommunicate heretics. Beliefs can vary hugely from one village to the next throughout India. Different varieties of Hindu theology can seem to suggest the existence of a great multitude of gods, or of one God who is manifested in many different ways. Or there may be a sense that the whole world is divine, and that the soul of any individual human is identical to the divine soul of the world. Hinduism can be very philosophical, or can simply be a spirituality which is woven into the daily habits of a rural population. Hinduism has a rich variety of rituals, covering daily life and special festivals, again varying greatly.

But there does tend to be a shared belief in reincarnation and karma. Hindus believe that the consequences of our actions are experienced in future lives on earth. Eventually, after many incarnations, the soul may progress to the point where it has no more worldly desires and is released from the cycle of birth and death.

Because Hinduism is so diverse, Hindus and Christians tend to perceive each other at first in very different ways. Hindus don’t find it difficult to accept Jesus Christ as a holy man or as one of a great many divine figures. For example, Mahatma Gandhi had great respect for the teachings of Jesus, which provided much of the inspiration for his non-violent resistance of oppression. It’s easy for Hindus to find a space for other faiths within their own diversity. However, Christians, along with Muslims, often take one look at the bewildering variety of forms of worship practiced by Hindus and conclude quickly that it is all idolatry gone mad.

Nevertheless, an increasing number of Christians over the last century have engaged in dialogue with Hindus and have found that the spirituality and values of Christians and Hindus can have much in common.

Sikhism

The fourth largest religion in the United Kingdom is Sikhism, which derives from the Punjab region on the border of today’s Pakistan and India in the 15^th century. Its founder was Guru Nanak Dev. He formed a separate religious identity for the people of the region, distinct from the Islamic and Hindu beliefs of the surrounding people.  Like Muslims, Sikhs believe that there is only one God. Like Hindus, Sikhs believe in reincarnation and believe that God can be known through meditation. Sikhs believe that God is known by people of other faiths, but they believe that people have often got distracted by proud arguments about ceremonies and doctrines.

Buddhism

A few words now about Buddhism, the fourth largest religion in the world. It was founded in India by the Buddha in the fifth or sixth century BC. It continues the Hindu beliefs in reincarnation and karma, and seeks to bring an end to this cycle of rebirth through attaining enlightenment. Buddhism has attracted many western enthusiasts in recent times. To western eyes, it seems have at its heart a philosophy which is practical and logical, which doesn’t require a belief in any god or gods, and which doesn’t rely on superstitious-looking rituals. However, Buddhism as practiced today in various countries in the east usually involves lavish temples, complex ceremonies and a devotion to various divine figures and highly venerated teachers.

At its heart, Buddhism notes that suffering is part of normal human experience, due to craving for situations that do not exist. Buddhists believe in an enlightenment which brings an end to suffering, advocating moral and balanced way of life in which people are no longer enslaved by their desires.

It’s possible to see Buddhism as something which reflects honestly on human experience within a profound tradition of meditation and self-awareness. Many Christians are wary of the way that this seems to suggest an alternative to salvation which is gained through one’s own efforts. Other Christians, however, suggest that there is a profound understanding of the human condition in Buddhism which can complement a belief in God rather than contradicting it. And those who have engaged in dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism report that they find fascinating similarities between Buddhism and the teachings of Jesus.

Chinese religions

Finally, let me just briefly mention the religions of China. Buddhism has been popular there, often mixing with other religious traditions. Also widespread are the moral philosophy of Confucius, the mystical religion of Taoism, and various traditions for venerating ancestors and worshipping local deities. Like Buddhism, Taoism has also attracted a lot of interest in the west in recent decades. ‘Tao’ means ‘way’, and Taoists believe in seeking a way of living in harmony with reality, a way of life which reflects the true nature of the universe.

Where does the truth lie?

So I’ve given a rapid tour through the largest religions of the world. Each of them is very diverse within itself. And there are a vast number of other beliefs held by smaller numbers of people in particular parts of the world. Human beings in most places for most of our history have been in some way religious. People seem normally to have a strong instinct to worship one or more gods, or to try to bring balance and meaning to our lives by connecting ourselves with some reality, principle or experience which is bigger than ourselves.

Religious people of all kinds do seem to be suggesting that there’s a right way to live which connects with something greater than the selfish desires of any individual human being. Religious people tend to have an awareness that we need to depart from our default way of life. And religious people often therefore suggest that human nature involves some kind of predicament or immaturity, and that there’s a solution which we need to embrace. But there’s a huge variety in views about the nature of reality and about what’s actually going on in the universe. Are there many gods, one God, or no gods? Or is there some kind of spiritual reality within nature or beyond nature which we can connect with? Are we souls who have become trapped in physical bodies, who are doomed to be reincarnated thousands of times until we finally lose our selfish identity and merge with the divine consciousness of the cosmos? Or are we physical creatures, loved by God, who will die once and then be resurrected to face judgement?

That diversity leads to some very serious questions. We are today more aware than ever before of the huge variety of different religious beliefs and practices in the world. Our own society is increasingly multicultural. And television and the internet can show us news of the vast range of ways in which people around the world are religious.

Is there enough in common between these various views in order for us to seek some kind of intelligible unity? Or would the seeking of such a unity be an act of arrogance or unfounded optimism? Does the diversity of religious belief point anywhere meaningful, or is it just a kind of superstitious craziness which we need to grow out of?

So I want to look now at the question of how different faiths can relate to each other.

Atheism

One of the most obvious responses would now simply be to abandon the religious dimension of human life and to label it as being plainly ridiculous and delusional. The failure of the world’s religions to converge on a shared theology looks suspicious to many people. And the tendency for religious differences to be associated with conflicts between different groups looks very worrying.

I don’t have time to engage in detail with that argument today, as it’s not really the theme of this talk. Have a look back at my first talk to see my arguments with Richard Dawkins. But I’d like to note that a huge amount of our humanity, our ideals, our values, our ways of relating to each other, our shared cultures and the structures of our civilisations is caught up in what we’d now label as religion. It’s not something which can be easily dismissed or abandoned. And those societies which have set out to be explicitly atheist have tended to be at least as troubled, violent and irrational as any previous religious societies. The vast majority of human beings who have ever lived have been in some sense religious, and have mostly lived settled, peaceful, meaningful lives. And they would say that their faith is at the heart of what has enabled their lives to be settled, peaceful and meaningful.

There is a human religious instinct, or set of instincts, which seems to be present throughout history and throughout the world. And it’s something which people widely perceive as being a central and a very positive aspect of their experience of life. People naturally seek to relate their lives to something bigger and more meaningful than their own individual desires and fears. They’re drawn to connect with some kind of divine power or powers which are responsible for their existence, or with some sense of a shared, deeper meaning. All this seems to me to be a large part of our identity as human beings. Religion, in all its diversity, seems to me to be pointing to something real and vitally important. Not surprisingly, I don’t think that trying to ignore, avoid or eradicate religion is the answer.

Exclusivism

The other very simple and obvious approach to the world’s religious diversity is to pick one religion and insist that everyone else is wrong. This approach is called ‘exclusivism’. Exclusivists embrace one faith very passionately with a strong conviction of its absolute truth. And they then judge all the other beliefs of the world from that perspective.

Exclusivism is really the default form of religious faith. If you believe that one thing is true, then you naturally tend to assume that any other approach which contradicts it is false. So there’s an honesty, a clarity and a directness to exclusivism. But there are different ways in which this works out in practice.

For example, some exclusivist Christians would be quite happy to affirm a number of things about Islam because they agree with Christianity. Both religions say that there is one God who created the universe and who will one day judge all people. So some exclusivist Christians would be happy to say that Muslims have partly got it right. They would say that Islam is at least partly pointing in the right direction.

On the other hand, many exclusivist Christians tend be very cautious about the crucial question of who can be saved. Exclusivist Protestants insist that salvation only comes through faith in Jesus Christ. And therefore that anyone who does not believe the correct set of Christian doctrines about Jesus cannot be saved. In the past, Exclusivist Catholics have also insisted that there is one true Church, and that salvation requires being a member of it. These cautious approaches to salvation tend to lead those exclusivists to view other faiths in a very negative way. They will often regard other religions as misleading distractions, and as ways in which people are deceived and led astray.

So at its most negative, an exclusivist approach to a religion may see other faiths as being evil. As being the result of demonic spiritual powers. As involving the worship of false gods which are directly opposed to the true god or gods.

Exclusivism involves the determined and honest attempt to make sense of the world from one religious perspective. Its weakness is that it tends to refuse to consider with any sympathy that there might be other perspectives with any valid grasp of the truth.

Exclusivism has a bad reputation in this country today, where people have much more sympathy for pluralism and tolerance. Many people associate Christian exclusivism with a history of western imperialism which we’re now rather ashamed of. It seemed clear, for example, to British Protestants in the 18^th and 19^th centuries that British Protestantism was the greatest form of civilisation in the world and that they had a duty to enlarge its influence around the world. The history of Christian mission conducted by Europeans is tangled up with the history of the building of empires and the development of global commerce. It’s a very complex history, and there are plenty of examples of missionaries who acted very lovingly at great cost to themselves. But many people would today want to reject the whole history as being thoroughly tainted by imperialistic aggression.

And as people try to understand the world today, they often perceive that it’s the exclusivist members of different faiths around the world who are most likely to cause conflicts and set off explosions. Exclusivism is perceived as dangerous.

Anthropology

So it’s often thought that exclusivism leads to an inability to understand other people and a tendency to be in conflict with them. All of which stems from an insistence on the absolute truth of one particular religious viewpoint.

A lot of people are very attracted, therefore, to an approach to religion which leaves the controversial question of truth entirely on one side. That approach says: Never mind whether or not there is one God, lots of gods or no god. Never mind whether or not there will be a day of judgement or whether there is reincarnation. Let’s simply concentrate on trying to understand the various different religious cultures of the world as they are in themselves. Let’s simply try to find out what it is that people believe, what their values are, and how their religious customs celebrate and nurture those beliefs and values. We’ll leave aside the question of whether or not they actually reflect anything true about the nature and meaning of the cosmos.

This is the approach which leads to the academic enterprise called Religious Studies, which began in the 19^th century and flourished in the 20^th. It seeks to compare all the religions of the world as dimensions of human culture. And it seeks to understand them using the tools and methodologies of anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy and history.

Here in Cambridge, our Divinity faculty is unusual in that our undergraduate course is the Theological and Religious Studies Tripos. It includes papers which take a more traditional approach to Christian theology and papers which follow the religious studies approach. In other universities, there’s often either one approach or the other, or even two different faculties which are a bit embarrassed about each other.

A more anthropological approach to religious studies might make us think of the kind of researcher who’s trying very sensitively to become accepted into an unfamiliar culture. Living for years among people in a distant continent, for example. Learning their customs, their festivals, their values and their stories. And trying to find out how their approach to faith and life works from within.

This can be a very interesting and fruitful form of research. But there are some big questions about its methods. However sympathetic we are, is it actually possible to get inside another point of view when we don’t hold that point of view? A researcher who finds out about a remote tribe and its belief in the Spirits of the forest may write down lots of ways in which that belief seems to affect their lives. But he won’t fully understand it if he doesn’t believe it himself. And his own approach, which assumes that it doesn’t really matter whether or not we believe in tree spirits, is arguably something of a failure to take their faith seriously.

That issue is called the insider/outsider problem in religious studies, and there is a lot to be said on both sides. Can you truly understand a faith that you don’t believe in?

As a Christian theologians, I would simply observe that I’m rather fond of the description of theology given by St Anselm in the 11^th century. He said that theology is faith seeking understanding. So that we believe in order that we may understand. It’s only when you’ve put your trust in a Christian view of reality that you can really see what it means. I think I could make a very good case to an atheist for saying that Christianity is rational. But it’s only when you actually come to put your faith in Jesus Christ that you can experience Christianity from the inside and come to fully understand what it’s really all about. And there are aspects of that experience which it would be impossible for me to explain to non-Christians. Just as I would struggle to give a complete account to anyone else of my experience of being married to my wife.

It seems to me that an anthropological approach to describing the religions of the world has a lot to offer and is a very worthwhile project. But you can’t fully understand religion if you try to leave aside the issues of truth and of personal commitment. Religious faith involves an individual being gripped by a sense of the truth of that faith, and making a commitment which shapes their whole outlook on life.

Pluralism

So onto another approach, which tries to find a way of saying that all religions have indeed got something of a grasp of the truth. This is often called pluralism. There’s an old story to illustrate it, about some blind men and an elephant. The story comes from India, where they are very accustomed to having a huge variety of beliefs coexisting side by side.

The story says that there were six blind men living in a village. And one day they heard that there was an elephant in the village that day. They had no idea what an elephant was, so they all went to go and find out by touching it.

One man got hold of a leg, and concluded that the elephant was a pillar. Another man touched its tail, and concluded that the elephant was a rope. The third man touched the trunk, and proclaimed that it was like a branch of a tree. The fourth touched the ear, and decided it was like some kind of fan. The fifth touched its side, and thought that it was a wall. And the sixth touched a tusk, concluding that it was a pipe.

And so they had a huge argument about what the elephant really was. Each of them had genuinely been in contact with the elephant, and each of them was relating something true about it. But their conclusions seemed contradictory at face value, because each was giving only a partial description.

I find that a very interesting and potentially helpful story. I do believe that the full truth about God is much greater than any of us human beings could ever fully understand. And the central point of the story seems to me to be entirely reasonable: there could be apparent contradictions between religious faiths which actually derive from people having different limited encounters with the reality of God.

If you’ve listened to my previous talks, you many have realised that I have an inherently pluralist vision of Christianity and its various traditions. I think that the Bible contains various different perspectives on the truth, such as having four Gospels. I think that Protestants and Catholics have focussed on different aspects of the Christian faith and have much to learn from each other, even when they appear to contradict each other. I think that Christian doctrine itself contains paradoxes, such as Jesus being fully human and fully divine, and God being both one and three. My pluralist vision of Christianity says that the full truth about Jesus Christ is complex and cannot be contained within any one perfect logical system of ideas. I think that God relates to us in a personal way which means that we may each perceive different things about him.

So I have a pluralist vision of the different traditions within Christianity. And I’m very open to having a pluralist vision of the faiths of the world. But I’d like to point out that the elephant story does have a dark side to it.

On the surface, it’s a story which is very warm, inclusive and tolerant. It suggests that we should all just be able to get along with each other without having to have nasty arguments. But there’s something very important to note. The story focusses on the blind men who can each only perceive a limited part of the elephant. But notice that the narrator is claiming to be able to see the whole animal and to understand exactly what it is. And the narrator is inviting the hearer of the story to share in that perspective. Somebody is still making quite an assertive truth claim, and suggesting that everyone else has a view of the truth which is highly deficient. Somebody is claiming to see, when everyone else is blind.

By its very nature, pluralism requires a belief that the pluralist has seen the whole picture in a better way than anyone else. My pluralist account of Christianity has involved praising some aspects of Catholicism, for example, and criticising some others. And celebrating some aspects of Protestantism, while pointing out limitations of some others. In doing so, I’ve been every bit as arrogant and judgemental as a conservative Catholic or conservative Protestant. My pluralist vision of Christianity is not quite as cuddly as it might sound

And similarly, someone who has a pluralist vision of the religions of the whole world might sound at first as if they are just being very nice, humble and tolerant. In fact, they’re saying something very confident about their own grasp of the whole picture. The other image that pluralists often use is to say that the great religions of the world are all paths up the same mountain. But that implies a claim to be able to see the whole mountain, as if the pluralist is hovering above it in a helicopter, watching everyone else picking their way slowly towards the top along different gullies.

And so pluralists are actually making a truth claim which is every bit as arrogant and potentially troublesome as any of the people who think that theirs is the one true faith. To claim to have understood all the religions of the world and how they relate to each other is a very ambitious claim indeed.

And it’s a very tricky claim to make. To come up with some kind of all-embracing multifaith theology is very difficult, especially if you’re trying to include those who believe in thousands of gods along with those who don’t believe in any.

One widespread pluralist view of religions is to say that religion is really all about learning to be good, learning to live a productive moral life alongside other people. And that each religion has its myths, stories and parables to illustrate a moral life, along with various threats and promises to motivate people to be moral. It sounds at first as if this pluralist view is very affirming of all the faiths of the world, and is being very friendly.

But someone who takes that stance is actually in danger of annoying almost everyone. Conservative protestants are likely to feel misunderstood rather than included. They’ll want to insist that salvation is all about faith in Jesus Christ, not about us trying to do good things on our own. And Muslims will probably feel misunderstood rather than included. They’ll want to insist on the central importance of obedience to Allah and the specific commandments revealed in the Qur’an. Not some generic humanist definition of goodness. And Buddhists may feel misunderstood rather than included. They may want to insist that there’s a lot more to enlightenment than just fitting in with the expectations of the society around you.

Worst of all, the religions can’t even agree on some basic ethical questions. Some religious people insist on being vegetarians or vegans, and would take great care to avoid stepping on an ant. Others carry out animal sacrifices as part of their religious ceremonies. So there isn’t even a shared religious vision of ethics. There are big problems with any approach to pluralism, including the approach which says that religion is all about being good.

Perhaps the most extensive ever attempt at pluralism is the Baha’i faith, which was founded by Bahá’u'lláh in 19th-century Persia. Baha’is emphasise the spiritual unity of all humankind. They believe that there is one God who has revealed different aspects of the truth through a series of messengers in different times and places, including Abraham, the Buddha, Jesus and Mohammad. That sounds very promising, inclusive and tolerant. But when you look a bit more closely, you start to see that the Baha’is have thereby acquired the ability to annoy and contradict all the other religions of the world. Bahá’u'lláh claimed to be the true successor of Mohammad, Moses, Jesus and the Buddha, which didn’t go down well with most of the people who believed in Mohammad, Moses, Jesus or the Buddha. He claimed to fulfil himself the things Jesus had said about his second coming and about the sending of the Holy Spirit. And Christians, on the whole, were not impressed.

As a result, Bahá’u'lláh failed to unite the religions of the world, and just ended up starting yet another one. The Bahá’í faith is one of the smaller ones, with about five million or so members.

Pluralism was also very popular for a time in academic circles, until its limitations became clear. One of its leading exponents was a man called John Hick, who was a lecturer in the Divinity Faculty in Cambridge in the 1960s and who died earlier this year. Hick got round the problem of one god or many gods or no gods by believing in something rather mysterious called the ‘Real’ (with a capital R), The Real is a transcendent reality which he said was partially glimpsed by people of many different religions. He felt very strongly that he was being humble by not insisting on the priority of his own Christian faith. And he believed that he could see how people of many different faiths were encountering the ‘Real’ in different ways.

However, Hick’s approach is an attempt to make the world of faiths fit into a tidy system invented by one western academic. It’s a good example of western academia at its most arrogant. It invents yet another religious picture of the world, and affirms only those aspects of the faiths of the world which agree with the system. Hick is now more usually presented as a good example of how not to conduct interfaith dialogue.

And so that’s the problem of pluralism. It sounds great to start with. But it effectively just invents yet another religious viewpoint, whether that’s a belief in the good, the Real, or a 19^th century Persian prophet.

Inclusivism

The final approach I’d like to discuss is often called ‘inclusivism’. Inclusivism is a bit like exclusivism in that it believes confidently in the truth of one faith. But it does so in a way which is very keen to acknowledge and to celebrate similarities between faiths wherever they can be found. And it can be very generous in its understanding of the scope of salvation, believing that people who have the wrong religious beliefs may still be saved.

Inclusivism is extremely significant in the religious landscape of today, because it was embraced in the 1960s by the world’s largest religious organisation, the Roman Catholic Church.

One of the key thinkers behind it was a 20^th century Catholic theologian called Karl Rahner, who developed the concept of an ‘anonymous Christian’. Rahner was firmly of the opinion that Jesus Christ was the only way to God, the only true connection between humanity and divinity. But he believed that the experience of the grace of God, given to the whole human race through Jesus Christ, could be accessible even to those who did not yet believe in him. Rahner especially had in mind those people who had never heard a credible presentation of the Christian message, but who were genuinely responding to whatever glimpses of God, or goodness, or love they had experienced within their own beliefs.

This approach is not without its problems. It still has the capacity to annoy members of other faiths, who are often not sure quite how to respond to being labelled as ‘anonymous Christians’. Are they being affirmed or are they being patronised? Are they being taken seriously in terms of their own beliefs? But an inclusivist approach is very open to dialogue, and to the affirmation of truth and goodness wherever it can be found. So it has often led to very friendly and honest relationships between people of different faiths.

Rahner’s inclusivism involves the very confident Christian claim that God, as understood by Christians, is the source of all that is good and true in the world; that Jesus Christ is the light of the whole world and of all people, and that God’s grace through him is open to all. This inclusivism suggests that Christianity has the best understanding of the truth of God, but that the reality of God is out there in the world for all to experience. It sees the other faiths of the world as a variety of different responses to the widespread human experience of the presence of God.

The Second Vatican Council, held from 1962 to 65 brought a set of revolutionary changes in how the Roman Catholic Church understood its relationship to the rest of the world. It had previously held the very triumphant view that there was no salvation outside the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. The Second Vatican Council brought the recognition that Protestants were genuinely Christian. And it affirmed that people of other faiths or none could themselves encounter God in a genuinely saving way.

Probably the most significant document in the discussion of how religions relate to each other is therefore a declaration produced by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. It’s called Nostra Aetate, the ‘Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions’. I’ll read a section of it:

Throughout history, to the present day, there is found among different peoples a certain awareness of a hidden power, which lies behind the course of nature and the events of human life. At times, there is present even a recognition of a supreme being, or still more of a Father. This awareness and recognition results in a way of life that is imbued with a deep religious sense. The religions which are found in more advanced civilizations endeavour by way of well-defined concepts and exact language to answer these questions. Thus, in Hinduism people explore the divine mystery and express it both in the limitless riches of myth and the accurately defined insights of philosophy. They seek release from the trials of the present life by ascetical practices, profound meditation and recourse to God in confidence and love. Buddhism in its various forms testifies to the essential inadequacy of this changing world. It proposes a way of life by which people can, with confidence and trust, attain a state of perfect liberation and reach supreme illumination either through their own efforts or with divine help. So, too, other religions which are found throughout the world attempt in different ways to overcome the restlessness of people’s hearts by outlining a program of life covering doctrine, moral precepts and sacred rites.

The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions. It has a high regard for the manner of life and conduct, the precepts and doctrines which, although differing in many ways from its own teaching, nevertheless often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men and women. Yet it proclaims and is in duty bound to proclaim without fail, Christ who is the way, the truth and the life (Jn.14:6). In him, in whom God reconciled all things to himself (see 2 Cor 5:18-19), people find the fullness of their religious life.

The Church, therefore, urges its sons and daughters to enter with prudence and charity into discussion and collaboration with members of other religions. Let Christians, while witnessing to their own faith and way of life, acknowledge, preserve and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians, together with their social life and culture.

The declaration then goes on in more detail to explore the strong and obvious similarities between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It condemns anti-Semitism and declares that discrimination on religious grounds is ‘foreign to the mind of Christ’. That declaration has had a profound and positive impact on the ways in which different faiths relate to each other.

Protestant responses to inclusivism

Protestants don’t have church councils making declarations like the Catholics do. But it would seem that a great many Protestants have adopted a similar approach. In the Church of England, a report of the Doctrine Commission in 1995 reflected a diverse range of views, but overall affirmed an approach which was broadly similar to the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council.

However, more conservative Protestants can be very worried about inclusivism. They will often base their worries on Jesus in John 14 saying: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ But the context of that remark is not a discussion of other faiths. And Jesus does not say that no one comes to the Father except by being a Christian. Or that no one comes to the Father except by believing in Christian doctrine. He is presenting himself to those who saw him as the one true connection between people and God. But that leaves open for us the question of how people today experience Jesus Christ. If Jesus is the way to God, how and where is Jesus Christ found? Is he only present in the Church?  Is he only encountered through believing in Christian doctrine, hearing Christian preaching or attending Christian worship? Or is there a wider experience of the presence of Christ in the world? Elsewhere in John’s Gospel, Jesus says that he is the light of the world, the light who enlightens all people. That may leave open for us the question of where we can see his light shining. Is his light only found within a traditional approach to Christianity? Or is the light of Christ shining wherever there is goodness, love and truth in the world?

Conservative Protestants will also want to bring the question back to the central issue of who is saved. But, here again, the Bible is ambiguous. All mentions of final judgement in the Bible involve God looking at people’s actions, not setting them a theology exam. In Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats, he indicates that there will be those who will be amazed to discover that they were serving him through the ways that they have cared for those who were hungry, thirsty, naked, sick or in prison.

Many of Jesus’ teachings seem to be designed to destabilise any confident sense of a boundary between those who are in and those who are out. He said that the tax-collectors and the prostitutes were entering the Kingdom of God ahead of the religious leaders of his day. Inclusivism is a fairly recent development in the history of Christian theology, but it’s not difficult to make a strong case on the basis of the New Testament.

As a result of an inclusivist approach, there’s now a lot of very interesting work being done in Cambridge and around the world on dialogue between different religions. David Ford, our Regius Professor of Divinity, is one of the pioneers of a practice called Scriptural Reasoning. This involves Christians, Jews and Muslims reading our scriptures together, and exploring the ways in which we understand them. It’s a very honest form of dialogue, in which genuine similarities and differences can be explored. Each faith can stay true to its own beliefs, while being enriched and challenged by insights from others.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would say that I support an inclusivist approach because no one has yet come up with a way of understanding all the religions of the world which in itself is an improvement on those religions themselves. No one has yet found a helpful version of pluralism which has been embraced in large numbers by members of multiple faiths.

A Muslim can take an inclusivist view of Christianity, seeing Christians as people of the book who are correct insofar as they seek to live a life of obedience to the one creator God. And similarly, I can take an inclusivist view of Islam, viewing Muslims as correct insofar as their view of God matches the one revealed by Jesus Christ. Which means that we can then honestly and frankly discuss our experiences of God and our approaches to life as friends.

Ultimately, it seems to me that there are potentially as many views of religion as there are human beings. There is much which human beings have in common, but we are also very different. And God knows us more deeply than we know ourselves, seeking to relate to each of us as we truly are. There is much for us to enjoy about the diversity of his creation. And much for us to enjoy as we learn to love him and to love one another.

That brings me to the end of this final talk. There will, of course, be time for questions and discussion. I’ve enjoyed these conversations immensely, and I’d like to thank all of you for listening and for taking part. I’m glad that this setting has provided a good way of enabling those conversations to happen. As well as your comments on tonight’s theme, I’d be very interested to hear from any of you who might like to suggest ways of continuing any of the discussions which have arisen from any of these seven talks.

The Chapel timetable will revert next term to its normal pattern of having a group which meets in my study at 6 pm on Mondays to eat pizza, look at a bible passage and have a very open discussion. Any members of the college would be very welcome to join that. And if there’s more you’d like to talk about, as individuals or as groups in that or any other context, do let me know.

 

This talk was given in Downing College Chapel on 5 March 2012 as part of the Theology for Beginners series.

Click here if you would like to listen to a recording of this talk.

This week I’m going to be talking about some of the issues which are most controversial in the Church today, and exploring how and why different Christians interpret the Bible in different ways.

I want to offer a kind of apology in advance. I’m going to be talking about issues which are hugely important to people’s lives. Including views of same-sex relationships and views of the roles which women can take in the Church. There’s a lot at stake here for people affected by those issues, some of whom will be here tonight. And it’s very easy for me as a married, male, heterosexual, ordained minister to pontificate about other people’s lives and about questions which don’t directly affect me. If I end up at any point sounding insensitive, or turning people’s deepest feelings into an intellectual puzzle, I’m very sorry. But there’s a lot of ground which I need to cover quite quickly. I shall try to do justice to various different perspectives, but I will inevitably fail, and my own biases will inevitably show through. But hopefully our discussion at the end can help to balance that out.

Conservatives and revolutionaries

At the heart of these issues is the question of how we use and interpret the Bible. How do we make connections between a set of ancient texts and the rapidly-changing world we live in now? Some in the Church may wonder if it’s desirable or even possible to base our lives closely on words which come from so long ago. And they may prefer now simply to talk about human rights in ways which sound more modern and accessible. Others in the Church are confident that the Bible has given us answers which are so clear and so complete that there’s nothing left for us to discuss. But I’d want to disagree with both sides there. I think that the story of Christianity involves every generation having to think very hard and to wrestle with new dilemmas and new opportunities. And I also think that the theological resources of the Church, centred on the Bible, have always been up to the task and still are. I think that there’s important work which needs to be done, with humility, patience, wisdom and compassion.

Christianity, as it’s described in the Bible, and as it’s seen in the history of the church has always had elements which are conservative and elements which are revolutionary. By ‘conservative’ (with a small ‘c’), I’m referring to a confidence that the faith which the Church has received is reliable and divinely inspired. So that this faith should be guarded and preserved, rather than tampered with. And by ‘revolutionary’, I’m referring to a sense that God is continually seeking to transform us and our world. So that there’s always more for us to learn about God and about what he’s seeking to do.

I think if we take the Bible and the whole of Christian tradition seriously, then we can see both of those approaches at work. And there can be very useful creative tension between them. But the conservative approach is the one which, by its nature, is most clearly defined. And that’s the approach which most people expect a religion to take. So it can often seem at first glance as if Christianity is something finished and unchanging. With a rule book which everyone simply has to follow obediently. When we turn to the issues under discussion today, we can certainly find verses in the Bible which express a negative view of women in positions of leadership. And verses which express a negative view of sexual activity between men. We can find a few brief sentences might appear to be the end of the matter.

However, if you consider the whole history of the Christian faith, in the New Testament period and afterwards, it’s a lot less static than people usually assume it is. I was telling the story of that history last week. And the people who believe in change aren’t just found in one rebellious corner of the Church. Some degree of holy restlessness can be found in most Christian traditions. So the Roman Catholic Church believes that God has continued to guide the development of its doctrines. And its teachings and its worship have sometimes changed quite dramatically, most notably as a result of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. And Protestantism is born out of an urgent longing for reform. A protest which says that the Church has to keep looking back at the example of Jesus Christ and the teachings of the Bible. Which says that we have to keep on asking whether we’ve really grasped the full vision of Christianity. And liberalism has a longing for social justice, with an urgent desire to think carefully about faith and to keep asking how it connects with life today.

The point that I’m moving towards is that debates about women’s ministry and about same-sex relationships aren’t simply debates between those who believe the Bible and those who don’t. It may sometimes seem that way on the surface. And it may suit some people to present them that way. But there’s something deeper going on which is about a creative tension that’s always been present in Christianity. There’s a conservative element which wants to keep on preserving all that God has already shown, and there’s a revolutionary element which is asking if there might still be more for us to learn.

Slavery and hermeneutics

But you’re not really going to know what I’m talking about until I give an example. So let me describe a significant change in Christianity that took place in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. A change which everyone would now agree with, but which was deeply controversial at the time. A change which took quite a few decades to be accepted. In order to help us to see something about how Christians actually use the Bible, I want to look first at the issue of slavery.

Now, suppose that a dodgy looking man in a white transit van approaches me in a quiet corner of Morrisons car park one Thursday morning, when I’m on my way to buy doughnuts for Keith’s Cafe. And he says: ‘Pssst…. want to buy some slaves?’ And he opens the door of his van enough for me to see that there are some healthy-looking captives inside. He’s willing to sell me any of them for quite a low price.

And I have a think about how useful it would be to have a slave or two. I think about all the menial tasks I could get them to do. But there’s a vague nagging feeling somewhere in the back of my mind that the owning of slaves might not be entirely harmonious with my Christian faith. So I take out my lap-top, launch my Bible study software, and I do a comprehensive search for all references to slavery in the Bible.

And it’s very good news! Because owning slaves seems to be fine. Paul tells slaves that they should obey their masters as if they were serving Christ. That sounds very promising. He doesn’t say: ‘Slaves, run away, God will help you escape.’ He does tell slave-owners that they should treat their slaves well, which I think I could probably manage. But fortunately he doesn’t say, ‘Slavery is bad, let your slaves go immediately!’ So the most obvious, literal, straight-forward, apparently obedient reading of holy scripture tells me that slavery is fine. Which means that I may never again need to clean the chicken coop, do the washing up or put the wheelie bin out.

And indeed, for most of Christian history, Christians assumed that slavery was just part of the way that the world worked. There were even popes and other clergy who had slaves. Some of the greatest Catholic and Protestant theologians said that slavery was acceptable, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin.

But, in Britain and in the British empire, it was evangelical Christians who led the way in getting slavery abolished. It was people who had a very high view of the supreme authority of scripture who campaigned against slavery. Despite the fact that, when you look up slavery in the Bible, the Bible seems to be fine with it. The most famous of them was William Wilberforce, a Cambridge graduate who spent most of his life campaigning against slavery after his evangelical conversion as a young man. He died in 1833, three days after parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act.

So why did evangelical Christians campaign against slavery? It’s because they didn’t just treat the Bible as a source of rules which were fixed for all time. They realised that there are ideals and values within it which don’t fit well with slavery. They realised that the Bible as a whole has a deeper set of meanings which go beyond a superficial reading of those few verses about slavery.

In the Bible, Jesus said that we should love those around us as much as we love ourselves. And St Paul said that Christ has come to bring reconciliation between people and God, and to break down divisions between different groups of people. So that all are one in Christ Jesus. And that, in Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male or female. Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God transforming the world, so that the last would be first and the meek would inherit the earth. And he said that the Spirit of the Lord had anointed him to bring good news to the poor. To proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.

From those central Christian values flows very naturally a longing for a better world, a longing for social justice, a longing to break down barriers, and a longing for a society which fairly includes all people rather than victimising any particular groups. So there’s plenty in the Bible to inspire people to campaign against slavery. Even though the obvious verses about slavery mostly seem to be fine with it.

That demonstrates that the Bible isn’t just a definitive list of laws and instructions. It’s a lot more dynamic than a set of rules and regulations. Christianity was always supposed to be about life in the Holy Spirit rather than just an obedience to the letter of the Law, as Paul makes clear.

It seems to me that the Bible shows what happens when the highest of ideals meets the messy realities of human life. God, who is the source of all goodness and truth, comes into relationship with human beings. But those human beings are limited by their own selfishness and by the constraints and compromises of their particular situations.

So the Bible describes the most highly exalted, beautiful, inspiring, moral ideals. Love God. Love your neighbour. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. We are all one in Christ. But then those ideals then have to be lived out within the messy realities of sinful human lives. And within all the limitations and compromises of human society. And God has to start somewhere. He has to start within the limitations of particular contexts.

It’s important for us therefore to understand the context of the verses in the Bible which accept slavery. This was a patriarchal society, ruled by imperial power, which was economically dependent on slavery. And the Church, at that time, was a small, persecuted minority group. It had no rights, no power, no ability to change its society. If a group of radical Christians had presented a petition to the Roman emperor, demanding an end to slavery, they wouldn’t have achieved much. Stunned silence, laughter, or a gory encounter with gladiators and lions probably. Trying to get slavery abolished in the first century wasn’t a realistic option.

So Paul doesn’t develop a plan to transform the economic and social structures of society. He stays within those structures. He tells slave-owners that they are accountable to God, who shows no partiality. And he tells them they have a duty to treat their slaves justly, fairly and without threatening them.

But things were very different by Wilberforce’s time eighteen centuries later. The context of the Church had totally changed. A new situation had developed which was very different from Paul’s. Britain was a country with a strong, widely-shared commitment to Christianity. And there were many keen Christians in positions of real power and influence in the government. And they realised that they now had an opportunity which Paul would never have dreamed of. They were able to take the values shown in the Bible stage further in practice. In their context, Christian ideals could be lived out in a deeper way. And that’s how slavery was abolished. And why I still need to clean my chicken coop myself.

So, there I’ve demonstrated some things about hermeneutics, the process of understanding the texts of the Bible in their context and seeking to interpret their message for today. It really isn’t just a case of doing a search for a key word, pulling out a verse or two, and then saying that this is God’s final answer for all time on that subject. If you do that kind of search for texts about women in leadership or about same-sex relationships, then you can indeed find a few verses which seem to provide an immediate answer. We can find a few verses which are opposed to women in leadership, and we can find a few verses which are opposed to same-sex relationships. But those verses on their own may not reflect the full vision of the Christian life found in the Bible. They may not provide God’s final answer for all time about the details of Christian ministry in all times and places. And they may not provide God’s final answer for all time about the details of human relationships in all times and places. We may need to think quite carefully about the context of those verses. We may need to ask deeper questions about Christian values, and about the ways in which God is seeking to transform people, and the ways in which life today is very different from life in the ancient world.

That’s the kind of discussion that needs to happen and is happening. That’s why there are debates in the Church today.

Debate and development

And I want to say that it’s not at all unusual for there to be issues in the Church which people have to puzzle over, debate about and struggle with. That’s always been the case, as I described last week. Christianity isn’t about a comprehensive set of rules falling out of the sky and then being obeyed for evermore without question. The story of Christianity has always been one of growth which comes out of struggle, debate and wrestling with dilemmas. That’s how the history of the Church has always been. And that’s actually how the Bible came to be written. That process of struggling with questions is very much there within the Bible itself.

Some of the main questions which the New Testament authors are struggling with are about how a belief in Jesus can spread beyond the boundaries of the Jewish people. The Jews had a very strong sense that they were God’s chosen people, and that they should keep themselves separate from the gentiles, the people of the surrounding nations.

But the Acts of the Apostles describes how God sent Peter and some other Jewish Christians to speak to a group of gentiles about Jesus Christ. And Peter and his companions were amazed when the gentiles responded to their message and were filled with the Holy Spirit. They were amazed that these people who weren’t Jewish were sharing in their experience of God. And so they realised that what God was now doing had burst out beyond the old boundaries and rules which had meant so much to them. So they had to rethink what they believed. ‘God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life,’ they said, in amazement.

But there were still many questions about how the gentile converts should relate to the Jewish Christians. The argument about whether or not men needed to be circumcised went on for a long time. And, at one point, Paul had a massive row with Peter over his refusal to eat with Gentiles. It took a long while for everyone to recognise what God was now doing, because it didn’t fit tidily within the old rules. But they gradually realised that this new work of the Holy Spirit was in harmony with the original calling of the people of Israel to bring God’s blessing to the whole world.

So my point is that both within the history of the Church and within the Bible itself, there’s a lot more to Christianity than just the keeping of a perfect set of unchanging rules. There’s a process of struggle, debate, change and development which keeps on happening. At the heart, there’s a message about a divine love which is seeking to transform us. But we should never be able to say that we’ve fully understood the boundaries of that love. And we can never condense our relationships with God into a perfect set of rules and procedures. As the world changes, as the Church grows, God may be seeking to do things that we have not yet understood.

A conservative view of the role of women

And so now, after that introductory exploration of hermeneutics, I’m ready to start talking about women and their roles in the Church.

A conservative view of women says that women shouldn’t be allowed to be leaders in the Church now because they weren’t allowed to be before. They weren’t allowed to be leaders in the time when the New Testament was written, nor for many centuries afterwards. Paul wrote to Timothy: ‘I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.’ A conservative view stresses also that God created men and women to take different kinds of roles in the home, in the church and in society. It says that men and women are of equal status in the sight of God, but have different callings. It says that this is part of the way we are created, and therefore isn’t something which we should seek to change. Conservative Christians note that Jesus only appointed male apostles. And the Catholic Church emphasises that its bishops, priests and deacons have always been male. Conservative Christians therefore believe that this is God’s plan for all time, as shown in the Bible and in the traditions of the Church.

Nevertheless, there are some examples of women in leadership in the Bible. In the Old Testament, there’s Deborah who ruled over Israel as judge and prophetess, described in the Book of Judges. And Esther, a Jewish woman who became the Queen of Persia and prevented the massacre of the Jews within the Persian empire. And Paul’s view of women’s roles does seem to vary. He doesn’t always tell them to keep quiet. He allows women to prophesy in the Corinthian Church, which means that they can proclaim to the congregation what they believe God is saying. So there are enough examples of women’s leadership in the Bible to suggest that there isn’t something inherent in the created nature of women preventing them from ever having authority.

But I also think that it’s especially important to show an awareness of how the world has changed in the 20 centuries since the New Testament was written.

Changes in the role of women

The world has been changing especially rapidly since the Industrial Revolution. I’ve found it very interesting to trace my own ancestors back to the 18^th century, and to look at parish records of baptisms, marriages and funerals. The earliest Eyeonses I can find were farm labourers in Lincolnshire. And what really moved me was to see how many children they had, and how many of them died very early. Women were having perhaps ten babies, of which only two or three might survive to adulthood. And there were presumably a number of miscarriages as well. Nursing babies and coping with repeated pregnancies would have taken up a huge part of women’s time, energy and attention.

Infant mortality has greatly fallen in the developed world, and we now expect nearly all babies to live to adulthood. But for most of human history, the task of producing the next generation of people was a much more arduous one. Human societies knew that having children was an urgent priority, and an essential duty. In the pre-industrial world, there was a very obvious and unavoidable division of roles between men and women, just in order to survive. Women had children, and did those tasks which were compatible with looking after children. Men had roles which often demanded greater physical strength: farming, hunting and fighting in wars. And so there was a natural assumption that leadership roles and roles of significant public responsibility were the domain of men.

That division of labour is a very natural consequence of the physical differences between men and women. There’s something about it that can still feel instinctively right. It’s the default way for human beings to behave and survive.

But the world’s changed a lot since then. Mothers now typically want to have about two children. And our overcrowded society is no longer scandalised by women who choose not to have any. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more and more women had the time to start developing a much wider set of talents. And they began to enter a wide range of professions which had previously been male.

The first English doctor began work in 1865. Girton College, Cambridge was founded for women in 1869. Women were allowed to vote in British elections from 1918, and the first female MP was in 1919. The first female magistrate was in 1920, and the first barrister was in 1922.

Some institutions were a little slower to catch up. Downing College first admitted women in 1980, previously worrying that they might not be much good at rowing. And the Church of England began ordaining women as deacons in 1987, and as priests in 1994. A large majority of people in the Church of England support the consecration of women as bishops, which is likely to happen in the next few years.

We now live in a world in which women who have gifts for leadership are much freer to exercise those gifts. But conservative Christians insist that God has revealed his will for all time, and that the Church has no authority to appoint women to positions of leadership. They say that the Church should not simply follow the changing patterns of society, but should be true to its roots.

However, it’s just as easy to argue the opposite. Christianity took shape in a world in which women were not in leadership. And therefore, the early Church was simply following the patterns of the society of its day. It wasn’t expressing anything distinctively different or eternal.

And, just as with the abolition of slavery, there may be deeper values in Christianity which we’re now free to express more deeply. In several of the New Testament letters, Paul talks of the importance of the different talents which God has given us. And he emphasises the importance of all people developing and using their gifts to the full for the common good. And it’s Paul who says: ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’ Those values seem to suggest that women who have gifts for leadership should now be allowed to use them.

If Paul were raised from the dead here today, I think he’d be amazed to find a university with women students and fellows. And I think he’d be amazed to find churches with women in positions of leadership. But I think he’d come to delight in those things. And I think he’d be appalled by the idea that women should be banned from using gifts in the church which they’re highly skilled at using elsewhere.

It seems inconsistent to me to tell women that they can never be allowed to preach, but then not also to tell them that they shouldn’t go to university, or that they shouldn’t vote, or that they shouldn’t be a lawyers. If patriarchy really is God’s plan for the whole of human history, then we shouldn’t have female doctors, MP, voters, or academics. If the argument is that God has created men and women to occupy separate roles, then we should be talking about the whole of life, not just the Church. It seems odd to me to try to make Christian ministry a museum commemorating a world which has otherwise has passed away.

I think that there’s also an important point to be made about the ways in which we can find God at work within our own experience. As I described earlier, Peter was amazed to find that the Gentiles had received the Holy Spirit. And I think that many people have been in a similar situation today when they’ve been impressed by their experience of the ministry of women in the Church. They’ve seen, to their surprise, that God really is doing through women what they thought he only did through men. And the experiences of women themselves are also very significant. Female clergy speak of their sense of being called by the Holy Spirit in the same kinds of ways that male clergy do. The first person to suggest that I had a calling to Christian ministry was the female chaplain of Clare College, where I was an undergraduate. I was greatly blessed by her ministry, as I have been by other female clergy I have known and worked with. Those forms of evidence are so strong that I think that even the Roman Catholic Church will eventually feel able to make full use of the gifts of the women in its congregations.

Sex in the Old Testament

And now it’s time for me to start talking about sex. But before I talk about homosexuality, I want to make a claim which may surprise you. It seems to me that a huge shift in the Christian understanding of sex and marriage has already been taking place over the last century. Not a lot of people realise that. But you can find even conservative Protestants saying things about sex and marriage which would have seemed astonishing and perhaps scandalously dangerous a hundred years ago. Protestants today are happy to use contraceptives and to regard sex as being a good thing in itself within marriage. But the traditional Christian understanding of sex until recently was that it was all about the procreation of children. There was a CICCU talk last month about relationships which said a lot about sex as a way of binding a man and a woman together in a loving marriage. But it didn’t make a single mention of children. And that would have seemed dangerously radical and unbiblical to the evangelical students who were running CICCU a century ago.

To explore this change in belief, I need to go right back to the beginning. The first commandment from God to the human race reported in the Bible occurs in Genesis chapter 1. It’s to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’ If we’re trying to understand what the Bible says about sexual relationships, then we need to see that overwhelmingly when the Bible talks about sex, it’s talking about the procreation of children. God creates human beings and tells them to create more human beings. To be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And that commandment is at the heart of how human sexuality is understood in the Old Testament. The Bible doesn’t have the kind of straightforward emphasis on monogamous couples that many people like to think it does.

God promises Abraham that his descendants will be more in number than the stars in the sky. And Abraham’s way of living up to this role involves having children both with his wife Sarah and with her slave-girl Hagar. His grandson Jacob, also known as Israel, becomes the father of the twelve brothers who are the origins of the twelve tribes of Israel. And Jacob accomplishes this by marrying two sisters and also sleeping with their maids. This is the kind of approach to religion that tabloid journalists would love.

The greatest King of Israel, King David, has eight wives and a number of concubines. And his son Solomon seems to be the record-holder, with seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines.

Behind all this polygamy is the urgent sense that human sexuality is all about building strong families and a strong nation by having as children as possible. Psalm 127 says: ‘Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.’ So the Old Testament accepts polygamy and in some circumstances commands it.

Deuteronomy chapter 25 contains a law which says that when a married man dies without leaving a son, his brother must marry the widow. The intention is that they can then have a son who will take the name of the man who has died. The continuation of life through one’s descendants is very important in the Old Testament.

Genesis 38 contains a very significant example of someone who foolishly tries to avoid this approach. Onan is given the task of getting his dead brother’s wife pregnant so that he can raise up offspring on his behalf. But he resents the fact that the children won’t be regarded as his. And so he attempts a simple method of contraception. As it so delicately says in Genesis, whenever Onan went in to his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground. Genesis says that this practice was displeasing in the sight of God, and that the Lord put him death as a result.

All of which demonstrates, I think, that the main principle at work in the Old Testament’s understanding of sexuality is the urgent need to continue Jewish tribes by producing lots of children. There are frequent references to the idea that a woman who couldn’t bear children was in a very unfortunate and even shameful situation.

There’s also a strong emphasis on stable family relationships. For the Old Testament also condemns adultery and prostitution. And the second creation story in Genesis 2 says that a husband and wife become one flesh, because Eve was created from Adam’s rib.  Those ideas suggest that a sexual partnership is supposed to involve a strong bond, a faithful union of husband and wife. But that union is understood in the context of the birth and nurture of children, which is the dominant meaning of marriage as it’s described in the Bible.

Philo, the New Testament and the Church

There’s an interesting first century Jewish author called Philo, a contemporary of Jesus. And his writings insist very forcefully that human sexuality is all about the procreation of children. He sees any sexual activity which couldn’t result in a baby as being a terrible waste of a man’s seed. And he’s really rather blunt and offensive about this point. For example, he says that: ‘Those who marry women who have been previously tested by other men and ascertained to be barren, do merely covet the carnal enjoyment like so many boars or goats, and deserve to be inscribed among the lists of impious men as enemies to God. Those who seek to waste all their power at the very moment of putting it forth are confessedly enemies of nature.’

A similar emphasis on procreation can be found in the New Testament. Women will be saved through childbearing, says St Paul. Polygamy isn’t condemned yet, although church leaders are only allowed to have one wife. But the main innovation is the singleness of both Jesus and Paul. This was really quite revolutionary in its time, since a faithful Jew would be expected to seek marriage and parenthood. Both Jesus and Paul show in their own examples and in their teachings that singleness can be a Christian calling. They both lived dangerous lives involving much travelling which weren’t compatible with bringing up a family. They demonstrated that it could be a valid Christian option to serve God without marrying.

Significant numbers of Christians then came regard celibacy as something very positive and liberating. And the growth of the church over the centuries relied considerably on the lives of celibate missionaries, monks and nuns. And a ban on marriage for the clergy developed during the first millennium.

The result was that the Church developed a negative view of sexuality. It saw it as something which was necessary for the procreation of children but which was otherwise best ignored. Christians came to describe this in terms of natural law, an approach based on rational observations of nature. They concluded that the correct use for the human sexual organs was in making babies, and that the seeking of sexual pleasure in any other context was a breach of the natural order and an offence against God.

Contraception

But the 20^th century saw a great change in the understanding of marriage, associated with a change in the Protestant understanding of contraception. For the first 19 centuries of Christian history, contraception was universally regarded as something which was obviously wrong. Any people who were having sex and trying to avoid making babies were obviously acting against God and nature, indulging their own meaningless lusts and descending into moral chaos.

The change in attitudes can be seen in the resolutions passed by successive Lambeth Conferences. These are meetings held roughly once a decade of all the bishops in the Anglican Communion. In 1920, a resolution on ‘Problems of marriage and sexual morality’ proclaimed the following:

“The Conference… regards with grave concern the spread in modern society of theories and practices hostile to the family. We utter an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception, together with the grave dangers – physical, moral and religious – thereby incurred, and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race. In opposition to the teaching which, under the name of science and religion, encourages married people in the deliberate cultivation of sexual union as an end in itself, we steadfastly uphold what must always be regarded as the governing considerations of Christian marriage. One is the primary purpose for which marriage exists, namely the continuation of the race through the gift and heritage of children; the other is the paramount importance in married life of deliberate and thoughtful self-control.”

Those sentiments are very much in harmony with the teachings of the whole Church down through the centuries. But they were stated again then forcefully because a new situation had arisen which was causing a dilemma. Thanks to better sanitation and nutrition, the infant mortality rate had plummeted. As a result, the population of England was increasing at a very high rate. It nearly doubled just in the last 50 years of the 19^th century. That urgent sense of a need to keep producing babies was starting to disappear. Looking back on the first commandment to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’, people started to realise that they’d actually got that one quite well covered now.

But the conservatives of the day were genuinely terrified of the results of seeing a sexual relationship as potentially a good thing in itself, without anchoring it to the duties involved in bringing up children. The Conference condemned the ‘open or secret sale of contraceptives’. It lamented the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, but still condemned the distribution of condoms, saying that they ‘cannot but be regarded as an invitation to vice.’

But there was a growing pressure from ordinary Christians who didn’t want to have huge families. They felt guilty about disobeying the Church, but nevertheless were beginning to use contraceptives. So ten years later, the Lambeth Conference shifted to a different view. In 1930, it affirmed that the ‘sexual instinct is a holy thing implanted by God in human nature.’ And it declared that ‘intercourse between husband and wife as the consummation of marriage has a value of its own within that sacrament, and that thereby married love is enhanced and its character strengthened.’ It then reaffirmed that the primary purpose of marriage is the procreation of children, but suggested that there could be instances in which a moral obligation was felt to limit or avoid parenthood in marriage, and conceded that contraception could be used. By 1958, the argument had mostly died down in Protestant circles. The Lambeth Conference that year said:

“The Conference believes that the responsibility for deciding upon the number and frequency of children has been laid by God upon the consciences of parents everywhere; that this planning, in such ways as are mutually acceptable to husband and wife in Christian conscience, is a right and important factor in Christian family life and should be the result of positive choice before God.”

In my experience, it’s now quite normal to hear sermons and talks in Protestant churches which talk enthusiastically about the goodness of sex within marriage, but which never mention the procreation of children. The CICCU talk I referred to is a good example. Much is made, however, of the idea that sex is meant to bond a man and a woman very closely together. And the Genesis 2 mention of the husband and wife becoming one flesh is often mentioned in that way. So sex is now understood by Protestants to be something that belongs within marriage because it’s meant to be associated with love, trust, genuine intimacy, and as part of the ways in which the couple share their whole selves, body and mind. And the procreation of children is now seen as something secondary and optional which may happen later if so desired.

Most Protestants have forgotten that this is a very recent development in our history. And it’s common for Protestants to read the Bible as if this is what everyone thought it really meant all along.

Meanwhile, in the Roman Catholic Church, things have taken a different course. In 1930, Pope Pius XI reaffirmed the traditional Christian ban on artificial contraception. After the appearance of contraceptive pills in 1960, there was further pressure from Catholics for reform of this teaching. And in 1966 a Pontifical Commission on Birth Control recommended that couples should be allowed to use birth control. But the report was rejected by Pope Paul VI in 1968 in his encyclical Humanae Vitae. Part of the reason seems to be the fact that the Roman Catholic Church believes itself to be infallible, and the Pope felt himself unable to approve a change in its teachings.

And so the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church remains that artificial contraception is inherently evil. The only valid sexual activity for Catholics is sexual intercourse between a married man and woman who are not using artificial measures to prevent pregnancy. The practice of trying to limit sex to the naturally infertile parts of the woman’s menstrual cycle is permitted. But other sexual acts, such as oral sex or masturbation, are regarded as unnatural and sinful in themselves, since they can never lead to pregnancy.

However, it would seem that most ordinary Catholics are not paying much attention to the words of the celibate old men in the Vatican. There’s a curious shortage of huge Catholic families these days. For example, the birth rate in Italy is currently 1.4 children per woman. Overwhelmingly, Christian people now perceive sex as something which is good in itself within a loving marriage, helping to bond a couple together in a very intimate way.

Homosexuality

So now on to same-sex relationships. At the same time that the Pope was considering that report on contraception, the debate over homosexuality was gathering pace. In 1967, Parliament voted to decriminalise homosexual acts in private between men over the age of 21 in England and Wales. In the UK, the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement was founded in 1976, and pressure grew for Christian churches to affirm same-sex relationships.

It seems to me that conservative Protestants and conservative Catholics are both in a rather precarious situation with regard to their teachings about homosexuality. The leaders of the Catholic Church are clinging to the traditional logic which says that sex is all about making babies, which gives them a very logical and consistent reason for dismissing homosexual relationships without any discussion. But it’s a precarious situation because most of their lay people seem to think that they’re wrong.

And there’s an inconsistency in the current approach of conservative Protestants. They’ve accepted that it’s OK for a man and a woman to commit themselves to a loving, faithful partnership in which they have sex without making babies. And so it’s odd to refuse to consider that it might be OK for a same-sex couple to do the same thing. They rejoice in the ways that sex can help to join a man and woman together in a lasting, loving relationship. And so it’s odd not to consider that it might have the same kind of good function in a same-sex relationship.

But the conservative Protestant response to that argument is to claim that the Bible clearly condemns gay and lesbian sex. I’m a long way from being convinced by that.

Homosexuality in the Bible

There are six places in the Bible which may look as if they’re ruling out same-sex relationships. That compares, by the way, with hundreds of exhortations concerning heterosexual relationships. If I search the Bible for references to homosexuality, I do find a few verses which seem to be negative about it, just as I do find a few verses which seem to be positive about slavery.

But what is it that they are actually condemning? Are they talking about loving, faithful, committed, stable sexual relationships? It’s actually rather unclear. So I’d like first to look again at Philo, that first century Jew who wrote with aggressive clarity on the subject.

As I said earlier, Philo, like the authors of the Bible, saw human sexuality in terms of its obvious function in procreation. So he objected to men who marry women who are known to be infertile. And he objected to gay relationships for exactly the same reason. It’s clear from Philo and others that there were a range of sexual practices in Greek cities which Jews found abhorrent. One of them was pederasty, a practice which was widespread in ancient Greek society. Pederasty involved a sexual relationship between a man and an adolescent boy, which we would today consider to be child abuse. But it was valued by many Greeks, including those who would otherwise pursue relationships with women. Philo condemns pederasty very strongly as a waste of a man’s reproductive potential. He writes:

‘He pursues that pleasure which is contrary to nature, and since, as far as depends upon him, he would make the cities desolate, and void, and empty of all inhabitants, wasting his power of propagating his species… Like a worthless farmer, he allows fertile and productive lands to lie fallow, contriving that they shall continue barren, and labours night and day at cultivating that soil from which he never expects any produce.’

I think that may illustrate two things about the attitude to homosexuality found among the Jews and Christians who wrote the Bible. Firstly that homosexual relationships were seen as a rebellion against God’s command to reproduce. And secondly, that homosexuality was associated with behaviour that was very obviously cruel, degrading and destructive.

The first observation, as I’ve discussed, no longer seems to apply to us in an overpopulated world. No one in the Bible asks the question of how people should behave when the world has been filled with people.

And the second observation suggests that they weren’t in any case talking about the kinds of relationship we’re seeking to discuss today. There isn’t any passage in the Bible which clearly considers the possibility of a loving, faithful, committed, stable, sexual relationship between two men or between two women. There isn’t anywhere in the Bible which clearly evaluates that possibility and assesses it either positively or negatively.

So what does it say?

There’s are two brief condemnations in Leviticus which say that it’s an abomination for a man to lie with a man as with a woman. It should be noted that Leviticus also objects to the eating of shellfish and the wearing of clothes of mixed fibres, and those are rules which Christians are no longer bound by. And there are two passing mentions of homosexual practice in lists of sinful people in Paul’s letters. Men who have anal sex with men are put into the same category as liars, perjurers, murderers, idolators, adulterers, fornicators, thieves, the greedy and drunkards. These passages say nothing about the reasons for that view, which is assumed to be obvious.

There are only two passages of any significant length. First of all, there’s the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, from which we get the word sodomy. This is a very distressing story, in which all the men of Sodom surround a house and demand to have sex with two male visitors who are staying inside. That event actually adds nothing to our understanding of homosexuality. It’s not at all controversial to say it’s wrong for a mob to rape visitors. But this has nothing at all to tell us about loving, consensual relationships between men.

Secondly, there’s the opening chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul’s main point is that God abandons people to the consequences of their poor choices when they decide to ignore his ways. And he uses what seems to him to be the obvious example of that. ‘Men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with other men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.’

That’s the longest passage in the New Testament about same-sex sexual behaviour. A conservative view says that it gives a clear condemnation of all homosexual sex. But what’s it really talking about? It describes men who choose to give up sex with women and become consumed with passion for one another. That rather seems to suggest men who, by nature, are heterosexual. And it says that they have already received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. Which suggests that, whatever it was they did, they had good reasons for deeply regretting it afterwards, or that their way of life is obviously pointless and empty. Is Paul really condemning faithful same-sex couples who are thriving in long-term loving relationships? It seems more likely that he’s talking about obviously degrading practices found among the Greeks, such as pederasty.

So I don’t think that the Bible really answers the question that we actually face today. Now that homosexuality is no longer illegal, we’re seeing that there are faithful, loving, same-sex relationships within which people flourish. And we know that there’s no longer an urgent need for everyone to try to have children.

But many Christians still want to believe that God has arranged the Bible so that we can answer any moral dilemma by doing a quick search for a key word. And if we want to assume that the Bible must give us God’s final answer to any question, then we will conclude that God must disapprove of homosexuality. But that’s rather a circular argument. And a very lazy approach. We know that such an approach gives us the wrong answer to the slavery question, and it would give some very odd answers to other questions. And why should we assume that the people who wrote the Bible had envisaged everything about the situations we find ourselves in today?

It seems to me that the obvious passages in the Bible do not give us the answer we need. There’s neither a set of reasons which are obviously universal and permanent for banning homosexual relationships, nor a clear mandate for blessing civil partnerships.

A deeper look at themes in the Bible

So, as with the question of slavery, we need to look more deeply at some of the central themes of scripture.

Above all, there’s a central emphasis in the Bible on love and on the value of relationships. ‘It is not good that the man should be alone,’ says God after creating Adam. ‘God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them,’ says the First Letter of John. The Gospel is frequently described in terms of reconciliation and the building of relationships, between people and God and among people. And Jesus is frequently shown building friendships with those people who had previously been misunderstood and regarded as outsiders.

There’s a clear rejection in the Bible of forms of sexuality which are chaotic, promiscuous, motivated entirely by selfish desires, or which involve infidelity. But human relationships which are loving and faithful and help other people to flourish do seem to mirror something of the nature of God. And an expression of human sexuality which would help to nurture such relationships does seem to be potentially a good thing.

And the Bible is actually a lot less squeamish about the human body and about sexuality than the Christian Church later became. The Church ended up being run by celibate men, who perceived their own sexual desires as a hostile force, something which was a threat to their calling. More recently, Protestants have drawn attention a lot more attention to those passages in the Bible which celebrate human sexuality as something positive. Most notably the Song of Solomon, a book in the Old Testament which is full of very sensual, sexual imagery.

As I’ve already suggested, now that Protestants are willing to separate sex from the procreation of children, it seems somewhat illogical to refuse even to consider that there might be something potentially good about loving, sexual gay and lesbian relationships.

I’m also reminded again of Peter’s astonishment at finding that the Gentiles had received the Holy Spirit. He and others found signs of the good work of the Holy Spirit which didn’t fit into their rulebook. And so they had to enlarge their vision of what God was doing in the world.

It seems to me that we have to take very seriously the experiences which people have in loving same-sex relationships. There are now examples of same-sex Christian couples who are staying together for decades, supporting each other through the difficult times of life, encouraging each other in their faith, and helping each other to flourish and to develop their gifts. Those examples need to be taken very seriously. If the grace of God is seen within such relationships, then it would be an offence against God to ignore it.

The intriguing fact is that there are unusually high numbers of people within churches who are drawn towards same-sex relationships. I don’t have any statistics to prove this, but it does seem to me that there the proportion of men who are gay is higher among churchgoers than among the general population. It’s perhaps especially high amongst clergy and church musicians. I think it’s surprising that they’ve stayed, given the ways they’ve often been misunderstood and mistreated. But the Church is greatly blessed by their talents.

Maybe it’s not surprising that people who go through adolescence agonising about their sexual identity are more likely to think more deeply about the bigger questions of life. They’re more likely to think very hard about their own human condition. Which means that they’re more likely to be interested in religion.  And more likely to try to find out if they could be accepted within a loving, welcoming community of faith.

They may also find it easy to identify with Jesus Christ, who was often misunderstood and often rejected by others. They may also be especially moved by the lonely road he trod towards crucifixion. And they may be encouraged by his habit of spending time which those whom others rejected, welcoming those whom others regarded as the wrong kind of people.

But the experiences of Christians who are attracted to the same sex do vary widely. There are many who perceive quite confidently that their experience within a same-sex relationship fits well with their faith in Jesus Christ. But there are many others who believe that faithfulness to Christ requires, for them, a life of celibacy. And I have been very moved by things I have heard from people in both groups.

The first group feels that they have found something very positive and godly in their relationships. But they struggle with the hostility and rejection they experience from many churches. They’re annoyed that they have to choose a church primarily on the basis of looking for one which will accept their sexuality. And they struggle with the fact that many of their gay friends are hostile to their Christian faith, seeing it as something which is inherently homophobic. Theirs can be a precarious existence, in which they feel misunderstood and rejected on two sides.

The second group faces the very obvious challenges of a celibate life. They struggle with the fact that many liberal Christians can’t understand why they’re bothering to stay single. And they struggle with the fact that many conservative Christians still regard them with some suspicion, even though they’re celibate. It’s unusual to find a conservative church where people can be open about the fact that they’re attracted to the same sex but seeking to stay celibate. Despite the fact that they’re heroically living the lifestyle which a conservative church would demand of them. It’s still hard for them to find the kind of acceptance, understanding and support which they need and deserve from the Christian community.

Neither group has an easy time. And both groups deserve to have their experiences respected and listened to. The experiences of the first group suggest that the grace of God may well be powerfully present in and through the love of same-sex couples. The experiences of the second group reminds us all that there’s a strong Christian tradition of valuing celibacy, which goes back to Jesus himself.

My view, overall, is that there’s still a lot more to be said on both sides. I think that the Church is going through a time of transition in its understanding of sexuality, and I think that there are various things we haven’t got right yet. I’m wary of approaches which seem to me to be premature attempts to simplify something complex. Now that most of us have said that human sexuality doesn’t have to be tied to procreation, we’ve opened up a very diverse set of possibilities and questions.

I’m not convinced by the argument that anyone who’s gay or lesbian is therefore obliged to be celibate. When Jesus and Paul talk about celibacy in the New Testament, they don’t present it as a legal requirement for any specific groups of people. They present it as something which some people are capable of freely choosing, not something which the Church can impose.

But nor am I convinced by the very tidy answer that everyone who’s attracted to people of the same sex should aspire to have a civil partnership, or a same-sex marriage if we come to call it that. So that then the whole Church can be tidied up into happy couples. There’s a tendency in our culture to idealise and idolise sex; and a tendency in Protestant churches especially to try to Christianise that by idealising and idolising marriage. We could extend that tendency to same-sex relationships, but I’m not sure that it would in itself be the complete and final answer.

Conclusion

So I will offer a few final thoughts of my own. A loving, sexual relationship can be one of the greatest joys in life, something which helps people to flourish. And something creative which may bring about the birth of children. Yet there are also many ways in which human sexuality can be totally selfish, cruel, abusive, violent and destructive. And there are a whole range of rather grey areas in between those two extremes.

People who decide that the first priority in their lives is to seek to satisfy every single sexual desire they find within themselves are likely to cause a vast amount of pain and damage to themselves and other people. A high degree of self-control is needed among all moral people, whether single or in a relationship of any kind. Conservative Christians are right to worry that there are potential dangers.

But above all, Christians should insist that what matters most is love. The love which God has for us, and the love which we can develop for God and for each other. The kind of love which takes great delight in helping other people to flourish.

Traditional Christianity offers us two pictures which exemplify that love. One is Jesus Christ, the single man who washed his disciples’ feet, and who told them that he had come to be a servant and to lay down his life for his friends. The other is of the married couple who enjoy the delights of an intimate relationship and who share in the task of bringing up children. They grow through being loved, and through the demands of caring for each other and their family. Their love is both a private joy and something which requires them to learn great patience, perseverance, compassion and self-sacrifice. Their love is something which is creative and which benefits society.

A conservative approach might want to say that it’s only those two pictures themselves which are valid, and that every other approach to life must be wrong. But I think that’s unnecessarily cautious and limited. I don’t think that anything else should compete with the central place of those two traditional pictures. But I think we’re finding that there are other approaches to life which resemble those pictures in a variety of good ways. And which in their own ways include love, patience, faithfulness, self-sacrifice, creativity, service and a growth towards maturity. Christians can have faith that the Holy Spirit will be seeking to guide us. But I think we still have a lot to learn.

That brings me to the end of this talk. There will be time for questions and discussion shortly. You’re welcome to have a drink and to stretch your legs, or to leave if you need to. But I’d also like to say that there may well be very personal matters connected with this talk which you prefer not to discuss in public. If anyone would like to come and talk to me sometime in my study, confidentially, you would be very welcome to do so. I’m in room O8. Just send me an email or come and knock on my door.

 

This talk was given in Downing College Chapel on 27 February 2012 as part of the Theology for Beginners series.

Click here if you would like to listen to a recording of this talk.

Today, I’ve set myself the impossible task of talking about twenty centuries of history and theology in under an hour. There may be one or two things that I miss out or gloss over very rapidly, but you’re welcome to ask questions afterwards.

Over the last four weeks, I’ve made a case for theology being a real subject and have given a rapid tour of the main areas of Christian doctrine. My aim this week and next week is to look further into the diversity of belief which exists among Christians. Next week, I’ll be looking at the main issues which Christians disagree about today, such as same-sex relationships and the ordination of women. But this week, I’m going to be talking about the story of the formation of the main historic denominations and groupings of churches. So I’ll be talking about the Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, Lutherans, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists and lots of others.

Why do these different groups exist? And how and why are they different?

The New Testament

One thing that they all agree on is the list of 27 books which form the New Testament. They partly disagree about the Old Testament, which has 39 books for Protestants, 46 for Catholics, and various extra ones for the Orthodox. But the canon of the New Testament is something which all Christians share.

Jesus himself didn’t write any books, but we do have various texts written by Christians from the second half of the first century. The earliest writings are some of Paul’s letters, from the 50s AD, showing how the Church was spreading around the Roman Empire. And we have four gospels, which record and preserve the testimonies of those who had seen Jesus. And there is Luke’s account of the first Christians, the Acts of the Apostles. And there are other letters, and finally the Book of Revelation.

We know that Christians were using these texts in their worship and their theology in the second century. The four Gospels and the main letters of Paul were accepted as authoritative early on. But the status of books like Hebrews, James, the Second and Third Letters of John and the Book of Revelation was uncertain for a lot longer. And a few other texts floated in and out of favour in different places at different times. During the fourth and fifth centuries, a consensus developed across the whole Church about the definitive list of the canon of the New Testament. And so for all Christians, these are texts which can be used in worship and in the development of doctrine in a way which sets them above all non-Biblical texts. They testify to Jesus Christ, who is the word made flesh, the full revelation of God in human form.

So that’s the shared Christian heritage of scripture. But, while the Church was working out what to put in the New Testament, it was working out lots of other things at the same time. The development of the canon of scripture came alongside the development of a tradition of Christian theology, spirituality and church government. And a tradition of a shared understanding of how to interpret the Bible.  As the centuries have gone by, that shared tradition has deepened, broadened and sometimes diversified and fragmented. Christianity has spread into different contexts, and has been communicated within different cultures and philosophical frameworks. Different Christians now understand the Bible in different ways, and have various  views of the theological traditions which developed from the early Church. But they still have a vast amount in common. In many cases, they’re exploring different aspects of something which is rich and complex. And that’s the story which I have to tell today.

 

Church government in the New Testament

One of the most important things to note is that the texts of the New Testament don’t provide a full set of instructions on how to run churches. That’s something which people were starting to work out at the time the New Testament was written. And the books and letters within in it come from within the early stages of that developing tradition.

Now, the Church of England today has a set of documents which define how the Church of England works. We’ve got Canon Law, various policies and procedures, and a set of liturgical texts which say how run services. So there are rules about how to appoint bishops, for example. But those various rules don’t come from the Bible, and the Church of England doesn’t claim that they do. All we can claim is that those rules are compatible with the Bible. The phrase used in canon law is that they are ‘not repugnant to the Word of God.’

If we look at what the New Testament says about how to run churches, what we find is that various things seem to be happening in a rather unsystematic, ad hoc kind of way. The Church was growing rapidly, but often having to hide from persecution. And things to do with roles and structures seem to have been worked out in different ways in different places as people went on. Various titles are used, but without any detailed definitions. So Paul writes about apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, without saying much about how those roles should work. But they seem to be very practical roles, based on the gifts that people have.

Elsewhere, there are titles which seem to suggest an ordered structure of people in authority. There are elders and overseers, who are in positions of leadership. And they are meant to be treated with respect and need to be of good character. And there are deacons, who have significant roles of service. From the Greek word for elder, presbuteros, we get the English words priest and presbyter, which are used in different ways today by different Christian traditions. And from the Greek word for overseer, episkopos, we get the English word bishop and the word episcopal.

And most Christian churches make use of at least some of those words: priest, presbyter, bishop, apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and so on. And some Christian churches have managed to convince themselves that they are modelled precisely on the ministry of the early Church. But the diversity in the government of today’s churches has arisen simply because the Bible doesn’t actually tell us how to do it. And that actually explains a very large part of the differences between churches.

So, on with the story of how things developed in the early church.

Church government in the early Church

As I said, the Bible itself doesn’t give us a system of church government. But things did settle down into a hierarchical structure by the second century. And the pattern that emerged is one called monarchical episcopacy. Those mentions of presbuteroi and episcopoi in the New Testament, the elders and overseers, seem at first to be two ways of talking about the same people. But by the second century, episcopos, translated as overseer or bishop, came to be a term for the highest level of a threefold system. There were bishops or overseers, then presbyters, elders or priests, and then deacons. So would be one bishop for a city or area, assisted by a council of priests and supported by deacons. And it’s called monarchical episcopacy because of the supreme authority exercised by the local bishop.

For example, St Ignatius of Antioch became bishop of Antioch in about 69 AD, and he wrote a series of letters on the way to his martyrdom in 108 AD. It’s interesting reading the letters of Ignatius and others, because they’re the generation which followed those who wrote the letters of the New Testament. Like Paul, Ignatius wrote to the Romans and to the Ephesians, for example.

But in his Letter to the Magnesians he says:

‘Let me urge on you the need for godly unanimity in everything you do. Let the bishop preside in the place of God, and his clergy in the place of the Apostolic conclave, and let my special friends the deacons be entrusted with the service of Jesus Christ…. Maintain absolute unity with your bishop and leaders.’ – Letter to the Magnesians 6

And in his Letter to the Smyrnaeans, he wrote:

‘Follow your bishop, every one of you, as obediently as Jesus Christ followed the Father… The sole Eucharist you should consider valid is one that is celebrated by the bishop himself, or by some person authorised by him. Where the bishop is to be seen, there let all his people be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is present, we have the catholic Church.’ – Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8

So here in 108AD is an early use of the word ‘catholic’. ‘Catholic’ is Greek for ‘according to the whole’, meaning universal. So Ignatius sees the bishops as having a particular concern for the unity of the whole Church. And being part of this universal church, the catholic church, meant being united under the leadership of the local bishop. And the central act of Christian worship, the Eucharist (in other words, the communion or the mass), is to be presided over by the bishop or by someone authorised by him.

So, he wrote to the Ephesians:

‘We can have no life apart from Jesus Christ; and as he represents the mind of the Father, so our bishops, even those who are stationed in the remotest parts of the world, represent the mind of Jesus Christ.’

And later, he says:

‘When someone is sent by the master of a house to manage his household for him, it is our duty to give him the same kind of reception as we should give to the sender; and therefore it is clear that we must regard a bishop as the Lord himself.’

Now, that will probably make lower-church Christians shuffle awkwardly in their seats. But it’s not a an implausible development from the approach taken shortly beforehand in the New Testament letters. The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, saying: ‘Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.’ And the First Letter of Peter tells people to accept the authority of the elders.

It was natural for the early church to consider its clergy to be the successors of the apostles, handing on the apostles’ teaching and having their authority. And it was obvious to them that there was a clear, visible line of succession. Jesus had appointed disciples, who had themselves established churches and had appointed leaders. So each generation of leaders ordained further leaders to continue the tradition. This is what has become known as the apostolic succession. And for higher-church people it’s a very significant idea that today’s bishops are part of an unbroken chain of bishops which stretches back to Jesus Christ and the apostles.

From persecution to establishment

So this structure of monarchical episcopacy seems to have settled in all around the church by the middle of the second century. A clear form of organisation had emerged.

But the church was always under threat of persecution. It had to spread its message while trying to keep out of trouble with the Roman authorities. An interesting correspondence survives from about 112 AD between the Roman Emperor Trajan and Pliny the Younger, the governor of Bithynia, in what is now Turkey. They agree a policy on what to do with the annoying problem of Christians. If Christians are reported to the authorities, then the accused are given the opportunity to worship Roman gods, to offer incense and wine to an image of the emperor and to curse Christ. Anyone willing to do that can be set free. But anyone who refuses to worship the Roman Emperor and Roman gods and persists in professing a Christian faith is sentenced to death. So Christians met and worshipped privately in houses, trying to keep out of trouble while still trying to spread the Christian message. It was very risky, and many were killed.

But, as Tertullian wrote in the 2^nd century, ‘The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.’ All those who were willing to die out of love for Jesus Christ were a very impressive witness to those around them. People could see that Christians had found something powerful which meant more to them than their own mortal lives. Churches grew rapidly throughout the Roman Empire, providing a source of hope, community and stability which many began to find very impressive.

And then an extraordinary turning point came in the year 312. This could be seen as the most significant event in Christian history since the Day of Pentecost. It’s certainly one which has greatly affected the whole history and culture of Europe. It’s described in the writings of Eusebius, a bishop who lived at that time. And he tells us that a great battle took place at Milvian Bridge in Rome between two rivals Roman Emperors: Constantine and Maxentius. Constantine had come to believe that there was one supreme God, rather than a multitude of deities. And he prayed to the one supreme God on the day before the battle. Constantine then saw a vision of a cross of light above the sun, bearing the inscription ‘Conquer by this’. He saw something similar again during a dream that night. At dawn, he commanded the making of a new standard, a banner to lead his troops into battle. It featured the cross, and a design made from the first two letters of the name of Christ in Greek: chi and rho. Constantine won the battle and he became ruler of the whole Roman Empire.

As a result, he passed the Edict of Milan in 313, which legalised Christian worship. He became a very generous patron of Christianity, and supported the building of great churches. He granted privileges to clergy and appointed Christians to high-ranking offices. And in 380, the emperor Theodosius established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. This was a total transformation in the place of Christians in Roman society. From victims to leaders.

And here begins one of the most complex questions in Christian history: the relationship between the Church and the state. The link between Christianity and politics. Here and in America and elsewhere in the world, we’re still arguing about that issue today. Should Bideford Town Council hold prayers before its meetings? Should there be bishops in the House of Lords? Should religious groups in the United States help to fund the election campaigns of politicians?

Christianity had begun as something profoundly counter-cultural, persecuted by the state. Jesus Christ was crucified by the Romans, and many of the early Christians were put to death by the ruthless authority of the Empire. But this situation was totally reversed in the fourth century. Now there was an alliance between the world’s greatest superpower and this rapidly growing faith. Now troops would take crosses into battle, and bishops would have places in the corridors of power.

Eastern Orthodox Christians honour Constantine as a great saint, equal to the apostles. But many Protestants have wondered if this was when things really started to go wrong for the Christian Church. Should Christianity have this kind of alliance with worldly power? What does it do to faith and holiness when Christianity becomes a good career move, a passport to status and wealth? Is this partnership a great opportunity for Christianity to be a force for good in the world? Or is it a temptation and a source of corruption? Those are important and difficult questions for Christianity from Constantine to the present day.

Whatever we think of this alliance between Christianity and worldly power, it happened. Christianity took on the role of providing the shared belief system for the Roman Empire. And therefore the smooth running of the Church became a key factor in the smooth running of the Empire. And that development had enormous significance for most of the subsequent history of Europe.

Nicaea

Constantine’s patronage made it possible for the Church to become much better organised as a single institution. That in itself was quite an achievement. Christians were spread across a wide area, from the Middle East to North Africa and as far as Britain. For them to organise themselves under persecution was tricky. But now it became possible for them to function openly as an institution supported by the state. And this enabled a new development in the government of the church.

In the year 325, the Emperor summoned a council of all the bishops of the Church. It was, effectively, the first time that the Christian Church had been able to have a great big conference. The Emperor wanted Christians to be united, but there was a fierce argument raging at the time. They were squabbling about a matter which the New Testament is a little ambiguous about. Is Jesus Christ equal to God the Father, or is he less than him? Even just in John’s Gospel you can find verses which might seem to support either point of view. On one side of the argument were the followers of Arius, a priest in Alexandria. He said that Jesus was the first created being, made by God at the beginning of time, the one through whom God then created the universe. Jesus is therefore half-way between people and God – partly divine and partly human. But those on the other side, like Athanasius, insisted that Jesus is fully human and fully divine. In his humanity, he is less than God the Father. And in his divinity, he is equal to God the Father. And the Council supported their views against Arius.

It’s from the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople in 381 that we get the Nicene Creed. This is still said as part of Christian worship in many churches. It proclaims that Jesus is ‘God from God, Light from Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father.’

And the Council of Nicaea began a pattern of church government which has been very significant. When a controversial question needed to be settled, the bishops of the Church would meet together and sort it out. These councils are called ‘Ecumenical Councils’. Seven were held in the first millennium, and they are recognised as authoritative by Roman Catholics and by Orthodox Christians.

And the Roman Catholic Church has continued the practice, now reaching a total of 21 councils. The last example was the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, involving over 2000 Roman Catholic bishops from all over the world. More about that later.

During the fourth and fifth centuries, final agreement was reached on the question of which books should be in the New Testament, and of issues relating to the person of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. Christian doctrine became gradually more clearly defined, and various alternative approaches were ruled out as heresies. The first big and lasting split in the Church came as a result of the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451. Chalcedon was grappling with some of the details of the humanity and divinity of Christ. It proclaimed that Christ was one person with two natures, human and divine. And it said that these natures existed without in any way diluting or changing the other. But a group called the Monophysites insisted that Christ had only one nature, a fusion of divinity and humanity. They rejected the Council and went their own separate way, forming the Oriental Orthodox Churches. From them are descended today’s Egyptian Coptic Orthodox  Church, the Ethopian Orthodox Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church , and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church in India. To most western eyes and minds, they are extremely similar to the other eastern Orthodox churches, but the split has remained.

Patriarchs and the papacy

On with the story of what happened to everyone else. By this time, the Roman Empire had got into serious trouble. The last time that the whole empire was united under one leader came to an end with the death of Theodosius I in the year 395. And the western part of the empire came under attack from various different invading tribes: Vandals, Visigoths, Huns and so on. Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, at which time the Romans retreated from their rule in Britain and elsewhere. The capital of the Empire had already been moved to Constantinople in the east, now called Istanbul. The Empire fell apart in the west. But the Greek-speaking Christian civilisation of the eastern Roman Empire continued to flourish, known as the Byzantine Empire.

Alongside all these upheavals, the Church continued to develop its hierarchical systems of government. There were many bishops looking after local areas, but a small number of them came to develop a greater authority over wider areas, being in charge of other bishops. The Council of Nicaea recognised that the bishops of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch had authority over wider areas. And Jerusalem and Constantinople later gained such status. During the sixth century, those bishops gained the title of patriarchs. So there were five patriarchs, overseeing the five patriarchates of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. Covering most of the territory around the Mediterranean. The patriarchs mostly governed their own affairs within their own territories. But the bishop of Rome was understood to have the place of highest honour among them, and came to have the title Pope, meaning father.

Things were now very different in the patriarchate of Rome compared with the other four territories further east. Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria were very much under the authority and protection of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. But Rome was on the frontier, facing the barbarians. And there was a cultural difference: Rome spoke Latin, while the eastern patriarchates spoke Greek. So there were various political and cultural differences between the Christians of the east and the west.

The east was firmly dominated by the Emperor. But the Bishop of Rome had become the leading figure in the Christian civilisation of the west. The western church was well-organised and resourceful in itself, and began to be very successful in its mission to bring Christianity to the tribes who ruled western Europe. They began to convert the surrounding peoples, such as the Franks, and their kings. King Ethelbert welcomed St Augustine to Kent in 597, where he became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. He spread a form of Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons which was under the authority of Rome. And this new movement eventually reabsorbed the Celtic Christianity which had persisted in the remoter parts of the British Isles. On the continent, in 800, Pope Leo II crowned Charlemagne as Emperor over today’s France and other nearby regions.

Back in the east, the Church was still the religion of the Byzantine Empire. But in the west, the pope came to preside over the state religions of several different countries.  And his authority stretched over a territory which was much greater than those of the other four patriarchs in the east. The western church was well organised, successful, outward looking and increasingly powerful.

As the patriarchate of Rome grew, so the theological understanding of the Papacy developed. The Pope was understood to be the successor of St Peter, who was believed to have been the first Bishop of Rome. And it was believed that Christ had given the leadership of the Church to Peter in order that he would pass it on to his successors as Bishops of Rome. The Popes therefore began to claim more and more authority over the rest of the Church. They claimed to have authority over all five patriarchates.

But these claims to universal jurisdiction were never formally recognised by the eastern patriarchs. And the eastern Christians were somewhat preoccupied with their own troubles. From its beginnings in 622, Islam had been spreading aggressively across the territory of the eastern patriarchates in North Africa and the Middle East. The eastern churches were in retreat.

To western Christians, the Pope was the obvious leader of the world’s Christians. And the Latin-speaking western Church was on the rise. But the Greek-speaking eastern patriarchs were never willing to accept him as more than the first among equals, the patriarch of greatest honour. And so the Christian faiths of the east and the west continued to grow apart over a long period, for political and cultural reasons. The division became formal and final in the year 1054 in the event known as the Great Schism. Following a row over the authority of Rome, both sides excommunicated the other. And they have remained divided ever since.

Those four eastern patriarchates are the origins of the Orthodox Churches of today. While the western Patriarchate became, of course, what we know as the Roman Catholic Church. As I’ve described, the main thing they fell out over was the authority of the Pope. But Orthodox theologians also get very annoyed about one extra word which western Christians have inserted in the Nicene Creed, saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father.

From a protestant perspective, Orthodox and Catholic theology and spirituality have much in common. Both groups attach great importance to their hierarchy of bishops, priests and deacons. They value beautiful buildings, elaborate ceremonies and traditional liturgies. They ask for the prayers of saints whom they believe are in heaven, and they pray for the souls of others who have died. They venerate Mary as the Mother of God. They place a great emphasis on sacraments: not just baptism and the eucharist, but also confirmation, ordination, marriage, the confession of sins to priests and the anointing of the sick. They have well developed traditions of religious orders, in which communities of monks and nuns live under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. These are all aspects of Christian faith which developed during the first millennium.

The Reformation

But the story now leads us on towards the Reformation and the origins of Protestantism. The Christian civilisation of western Europe continued to develop at an accelerating pace in the second millennium. And the Catholic Church provided the shared vision of life which held this civilisation together. The love of scholarship found in religious communities lead to the development of universities, such as Bologna in 1088 and Cambridge in 1209. Many of the great texts of the classical world were rediscovered and studied enthusiastically in these new Catholic universities. And there was economic growth, technological growth and the growth in the military power of individual monarchs.

The Catholic Church became even more powerful and wealthy during the Middle Ages. It was a force for good in many ways, holding society together. But it could also be ruthless to any who opposed it, as seen in the inquisitions and the crusades. And its power and wealth attracted leaders who were sometimes scandalously immoral. Popes and senior clergy lived as wealthy aristocrats, with palaces, many servants, courts, coats of arms, and sometimes even their own private armies. Inevitably, some of them really were there just for the money and the power. Their lives could be a long way from the example of Jesus – the one who had washed his disciples’ feet and told them that the greatest among them would be their servant.

Lots of different tensions developed at this time. Individual monarchs were becoming more powerful and were flexing their military muscles. Theologians were looking closely at the Bible and the writings of the early church fathers. And devout Christians were sometimes shocked by the state of the Church and its leaders. The invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440 made it much easier for radical thinkers to share and spread ideas. And it became less and less easy for one central authority to keep a hold on what everybody taught.

It all burst apart in the 16^th century in the time known as the Reformation.

The trigger was something I mentioned two weeks ago: the scandalous practice of the sale of indulgences. The Church was raising money for the building of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome by selling documents which claimed to reduce people’s time in Purgatory. In other words, the Catholic Church was selling places on an alleged fast track to Heaven. A German monk called Martin Luther began a protest against this in 1517, by nailing his famous Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Church in Wittenberg. Luther was a very scrupulous, earnest monk who had found Catholic spirituality to be arduous and disheartening. However much he devoted himself to fasting, prayer, pilgrimage and the frequent confession of his sins, he couldn’t find a sense of peace with God. He found the answer in the Bible, especially in Paul’s Letters to the Romans and the Galatians. There, he found an emphasis on the grace of God, a free gift of forgiveness which we receive through faith. He found a sense that he could trust his future into God’s hands because of Jesus Christ, rather than having to go through a daily panic about the state of his eternal soul. And he was appalled that people were being told that they needed to pay the Church in order to receive the grace of God.

Before the Reformation, the Church had gradually developed a very busy repertoire of sacraments, penances, pilgrimages, ceremonies and financial transactions. Salvation could seem to involve a large number of works which people had to do. And even the most earnest Christian, who tried his hardest, could still fear that it wouldn’t be enough. Hence the need for large donations to make up for our human shortcomings.

Against this emphasis on works came the new Protestant emphasis on justification by faith alone. Luther said that salvation is all about something which Jesus Christ has done for us. Because of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, God is willing to see us as righteous. God forgives us and accepts us because of Jesus Christ, not because of our achievements.

And this belief in justification by faith alone was based on Luther’s reading of the Bible. Not on the traditional Catholic reading of the Bible, but on a view that Luther himself had reached. So he concluded that the Church could go wrong. He concluded that Popes and councils of bishops could make mistakes. For Luther, there was an urgent need to go back to the documents which defined the beginnings of Christianity. To try to read the Bible with fresh eyes and to bring reform to the Church.

Tragically, the church hierarchy didn’t engage constructively with Luther’s criticisms of the scandal of indulgences. Luther was excommunicated by the Pope in 1521, and so began the separate existence of churches which protested against the errors of Rome: the Protestants.

Protestants, Catholics and the relationship between God and people

I’d like to reflect a little on that divide and on the question of how we interpret the Bible.

I spoke in my fourth talk about the differences between high and low church views of Christianity. High church Christianity believes that the traditions and practices of the Church have been revealed by God as his gracious ways of helping us. But low church Christianity seeks a simple and direct sense of faith in a message revealed in the scriptures. I said then that both sides had things to learn from each other. And I would say the same thing about the central theological arguments of the Reformation.

It seems to me that the Bible is describing a relationship between God and people. God does everything to make that relationship possible, and invites us into it. And that means that there’s something important about what he does, and something important about how we respond. But, there’s a great diversity even in the Bible in the ways in which the relationship between God and people is described. And so it’s possible to interpret it in very different ways, as Protestants and Catholics have done.

Sometimes, the emphasis in the Bible is very strongly on divine power, divine decision and divine providence. And sometimes, the emphasis in the Bible is very strongly on the importance of the decisions and actions of human beings. Sometimes, salvation is described entirely as something which God has done for us. And sometimes it’s described as something which we have to accept, which we have to work out and persevere in. On the one hand, there are a few mentions of predestination and plenty of mentions of God’s plans, God’s prophetic words and God’s providence. On the other hand, there are lots of passages which show real human choices and their consequences, and which are meant to provoke us to make the right choices. So Paul writes about faith, and James says that faith without works is dead. Both sides of the relationship seem to matter.

But there are various points in Christian history in which people seem to me to have gone too far in emphasising one side of the divine-human relationship. And an imbalance tends to be followed by people overcorrecting in the other direction. There was a big argument like this in the fourth century between Pelagius and St Augustine, for example. And this see-saw effect seems to me to have occurred again at the Reformation. The Medieval Church had emphasised a very busy Christian spirituality. Medieval Catholicism could seem like having to work very hard and spend very generously in order to find your way to God. In reaction, Protestant theology placed all or most of its emphasis on God. At its most extreme, the followers of John Calvin concluded that we are all either chosen by God to be saved or damned. For Calvinists, there’s absolutely nothing we can do to change which group we are in. Salvation is all about God and his glory, not about us.

So do we buy our way to salvation? Or are we utterly powerless to do anything to change our fate? It seems to me that both of those views miss the real richness and wonder of the faith described in the Bible. The Bible emphasises both the gracious work of Jesus Christ, and the importance our response to it in our faith and in our actions.

Protestants, Catholics and the Bible

So let me say a little more about the Bible. The Catholics had said that only the Church could interpret the Bible. They had insisted that the Bible should be only studied by professional theologians in Latin, and kept out of the hands of the laity. They believed that the Church should teach the Christian message to ordinary people through sermons, catechisms, paintings, stained glass, ceremonies, plays and pilgrimages. But the Protestants, armed with their new-fangled printing presses, said that all people should have Bibles in their own languages. And I firmly believe that they were right to say that, as indeed does the Catholic Church today.

But the 16^th century Catholics did have a valid reason to be worried. The great problem of the Reformation is that it didn’t produce just one Protestant Church. There was Luther, but then there was also Zwingi, and they didn’t agree about some aspects of what the Bible says, such as what happens in the Eucharist. And then came Calvin, who took Zwingli’s teachings much further. And then other people came up with other ideas. And today there are tens of thousands of Protestant denominations in the world. Protestantism has a continuing story of disagreements about the Bible which lead to more and more divisions.

It’s a wonderful thing for people to have their own Bibles. But we lose something if we just try to read the Bible as individuals and as little groups and sects. We lose something if we pay no attention to the ways in which other people interpret scripture, if we insist that everyone else today must have got it wrong. And we lose a lot if we insist that the whole history of the church for many centuries must have been entirely full of error.

Today there’s a divide between the Catholic view that the Church and its traditions are infallible, and the widespread Protestant assumption that most of the history of the Church can be safely ignored. As a Protestant, I do believe that the Church gets things wrong and is always in need of some reformation.  But I also think that the Holy Spirit has been seeking to guide the whole Church down through the centuries and seeks to do so today. And therefore there’s something deeply important about trying to read the Bible together – with other kinds of Christians today, and with a sympathetic knowledge of the history of Christian theology.

The English Reformation

When I talk about bringing these Protestant and Catholic understandings together, I’m speaking from a perspective which is distinctively Anglican. I find in the Church of England a rather wonderful opportunity to draw on the best of a range of different Christian traditions. And I shall therefore be unashamedly biased in what I’m about to say about the English Reformation, which is my next topic.

It’s an extraordinary story. It begins, of course with Henry VIII. In 1521, Henry wrote a book attacking Martin Luther and defending a Catholic view of the sacraments. So the Pope awarded him the title ‘Defender of the Faith’, which the Queen still holds today. In most respects, Henry was a very loyal Catholic. But, he struggled to produce a male heir to the throne of England. For the security of England and its political stability, the King needed a son who would be in a strong position to continue the Tudor dynasty. Henry’s first wife, Catherine, bore him a daughter, but no sons. And so Henry sought to have his marriage annulled by the Pope so that he could marry Anne Boleyn.

In the way that things normally worked for monarchs at the time, Henry had reasonable grounds for expecting the Pope to annul his first marriage. She’d previously been married to his brother, and so the marriage had always seemed a bit dodgy. But Catherine’s nephew was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, ruler of today’s Germany, northern Italy and other surrounding areas.  Charles V had recently sacked Rome and imprisoned the Pope, so the Pope was rather scared of him. Ejecting Charles’ auntie from being Queen of England can’t have been an attractive idea. And so there was no annulment. And Henry seemed stuck.

But this all happened ten years after the Reformation had begun on the continent. Many other people had already rejected the authority of the Pope. Cambridge and other places were awash with Protestant texts and ideas. And a significant number of senior clergy wanted to reform the church. England was becoming more powerful, and there was plenty of support in England for the idea that no foreigner deserved jurisdiction over England and its church. You might see it as an early form of euroscepticism. And so a series of Acts of Parliament reduced the power of Rome in England, culminating in the Act of Supremacy of 1534, which made Henry the supreme head of the Church in England.

Henry’s theology otherwise remained mostly very Catholic. But he did order the dissolution of the religious communities of England, who had amassed a large proportion of the nation’s land and wealth. And he permitted himself to get married a few more times.

It was Henry’s third wife Jane Seymour who bore him the son who became King Edward VI at the age of nine. That was in the year 1547, 30 years after Luther’s 95 theses. And it was in Edward’s reign that England became firmly Protestant, as the young King’s Regency Council pushed through their reforms. Clergy were allowed to marry, and the Catholic services in Latin were replaced by the Book of Common Prayer in English, written by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. The 1552 Book of Common Prayer contained a very Protestant view of the Eucharist. And a Litany which prayed for deliverance from the ‘tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities.’

But Edward died six years later, and England suddenly became firmly Catholic again under the rule of Mary, daughter of Henry and Catherine of Aragon. But she died five years after that, and was succeeded by the Protestant Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry and Ann Boleyn. So, once again, Parliament passed an Act of Supremacy and England broke with Rome.

But things were a little different this time. Elizabeth reigned for a very long time, and took a more moderate approach to religious controversy. The revised Book of Common Prayer of 1559 was much less rude about the Pope. And the wording of the communion service allowed people to believe in either a physical or a spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The Elizabethan Religious Settlement tried to unite as many English people as possible after the religious divisions caused by the previous three monarchs. Elizabeth was called the supreme governor of the English Church, rather than its supreme head. She herself said that she refused to make windows into men’s souls, indicating that she didn’t want to enquire too rigorously into her subjects’ beliefs. She said: ‘There is only one Jesus Christ and all the rest is a dispute over trifles.’

The result was a Church of England which had a moderate Protestant theology, but which also preserved elements of its Catholic heritage. There were still bishops, priests and deacons. And an ordered, dignified, beautiful form of liturgical worship. And a strong belief in the importance of the unity of the church – a desire to bring Christians together rather than to split into many groups. So there were things which high-church people liked, and things which low-church people liked. This Anglican approach believes first of all in the authority of the Bible, but also values the traditions of the Church when they are agreeable to the scriptures. And that seems to me to be a very valuable combination.

The Church of England as we know it today dates from that Elizabethan Settlement. And since then it has provided a home for many different English Christians. In today’s Church of England, even just here in Cambridge, there are many kinds of churches. Some, like Little St Mary’s, seem more Catholic than the Pope in their ornate style of worship. Others, like St Andrew the Great, are very similar to independent Evangelical churches. And there are a whole range of C of E churches in between. So people have often described the Church of England as a broad church, or as a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism, a Church which is both Catholic and Reformed. There are still many things which Anglicans argue about, and I’ll talk about some of them next week. But there’s something about trying to stay together despite our differences which seems very important to me.

Protestantism and establishment

One of the key things to note about the English reformation is that the religion of the people was determined by the religion of whoever happened to be on the throne at the time. The Church of England broke away from the Pope, but it remained a hierarchical structure which was established by the authority of the king. It was still a top-down approach to Christianity. And that pattern was seen across Europe. Today’s Germany was then made up of many different territories governed by different princes. In some places, the local prince supported Luther and so his people became Lutheran. In other places, the local prince supported Rome and so his people remained Catholic. Most of the early Protestants assumed that the Church and the state should remain interconnected. They assumed that any process of reformation would rely on the support of a godly prince, the patronage of the local ruler. Both Protestants and Catholics wanted their version of Christianity to be their established, state religion. A whole country or principality would be understood to hold that faith. All infants would be baptised, all children would be taught the faith, and everyone would be expected to go to Church.

But, of course, that approach isn’t mentioned in the Bible. And the Protestants were enthusiastically seeking to base their beliefs on scripture. And so there came also a more radical approach to reformation which turned its attention to the ordinary people and their faith, rather than to monarchies and hierarchies.

The first flourishing of this new radicalism came in a group called the Anabaptists. They began as a small minority in Germany, and they were regarded at first as dangerous lunatics by everybody else, both Catholic and Protestant. They wanted the separation of Church and state. They said that infant baptism was invalid because they couldn’t find it in the Bible. They thought that the Reformation hadn’t gone far enough. They emphasised the priesthood of all believers, not just the clergy. Instead of a top-down view of the Church, with a hierarchy imposed from above, they had a bottom-up view. They emphasised the local congregation, formed by people freely choosing to be in fellowship with each other as Christian disciples. Their approach was made possible by the fact that individuals could now read the Bible for themselves. And the Anabaptists emphasised the New Testament teaching that each Christian can be guided by the Holy Spirit.

And so people started to discover that there’s something inherently democratic in a Protestant approach to Christianity. The Protestant view of the Bible leads to radicalism. It leads to ordinary people being able to reimagine the world and to set about trying to change it. This radicalism is something which causes no end of headaches for monarchies and aristocracies. And so the history of Protestant churches and the history of the development of western democracy are deeply interconnected. The Elizabethan attempt to unite the Christians of England under the authority of the monarch and the bishops never fully succeeded. It couldn’t contain all of those who had a radical, passionate, restless longing for a Biblical faith. A faith which questioned the powers and authorities of the world, and which sought a purer church.

So, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lots of different Protestant groups developed in various countries. Puritans tried hard to purge the Church of England of its remaining high-church tendencies. Some of them gave up and set up separatist congregations. Some of them went to America, such as the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, gaining the freedom to practice their own approach to Christianity. The first Congregationalists got started in 1592, forming independent churches which were governed democratically by all their members. Baptists got started in England soon afterwards, being Congregationalists who rejected infant baptism. Thomas Helwys wrote in 1612: ‘Men’s religion to God is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer for it.’

Another form of Protestantism developed north of the border. Scotland adopted Presbyterianism in 1560, a state church which had got rid of bishops.  The presbyterians noted that there had originally been no difference between the presbuteroi and episcopoi of the New Testament. And so they set up councils of elders, or presbyters, to govern the church. It was democratic among the elders, although not among the laity. And the Scottish fiercely resisted all later royal attempts to impose bishops on them again.

In England, political radicalism and Protestant radicalism developed alongside each other during the 17^th century. Dissenting groups such as the Ranters, the Diggers, the Levellers, the Grindletonians and the Muggletonians all objected in various ways to the authority of the King and his established Church. They had their greatest impact in the period called the Commonwealth, from 1649-1660, when the King was executed and England was plunged into civil war.

By the end of the 17^th century, England had a more powerful parliament and a restored monarchy whose powers were carefully limited and who were forbidden from being Catholics. It had a Church of England which was established, but people were no longer persecuted if they chose to adopt their own approach to Protestantism. Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists and others became a more settled part of the English landscape.

Calvinism and Arminianism

So the main thing that the various Protestant groups disagreed about was the nature of the Church, how it should be governed, and how it should relate to the government of the country. And Baptists had a different understanding of baptism. But there was also a widespread fundamental theological difference about the scope of salvation. And this is another example of the debate about the divine and human roles in salvation.

One of the biggest theological differences in Protestantism is between Calvinism and Arminianism. Calvinists emphasise predestination. They say that God has chosen in advance who will be saved, and that Christ died only for the sins of the elect. God’s grace is irresistible, and those whom God choses to be Christians inevitably become Christians and persevere in their faith. Everyone else is damned and lost, due to the total depravity of the human race. That’s the Calvinist view. On the other hand, Arminians believe that God would like all people to be saved and that Christ died for the sins of the whole world. They insist that God gives people genuine freedom to choose, which is why some respond to him and some don’t. And they interpret the Bible’s occasional references to predestination as a way of saying that God has foreknowledge of who will choose to become a Christian, rather than that God chooses for them.

Calvinism seems to me to be an overreaction against the errors of the Catholic Church. And Arminianism seems to me to get the divine and human balance about right. But that’s just my opinion.

Both Calvinism and Arminianism have been found widely within the same Protestant denominations, such as in different parts of the Church of England. And they’ve sometimes resulted in divisions, such as the separation of the Calvinist Strict and Particular Baptists from other Baptists churches.

Evangelicalism

But Protestants have often been at their most successful when they have emphasised the importance of the individual decision to follow Jesus Christ. Two weeks ago, I spoke about the evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic revivals of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries. Evangelical Christianity stresses the importance of the faith and the experience of individual people. It’s very different from an emphasis on hierarchies and monarchs. Evangelical Christianity grew rapidly from the 18^th century, flourishing within the older denominations and also spilling out beyond them.

One of the key leaders of the evangelical movement was a Church of England clergyman called John Wesley. He lived in the 18^th century and is remembered as the founder of Methodism. Wesley was a passionate preacher who travelled very widely, preaching an enthusiastic, Arminian view of Christianity, and calling people to respond to Jesus Christ. As a result of his preaching, keen groups of Christians began meeting locally in many parts of Britain and America. Wesley tried hard to keep his enthusiastic converts within the Church of England. But the Church of England lacked Wesley’s vision, and it failed shamefully to organise the ordination of clergy for the colonies in America.

The Church of England has preserved that second-century tradition that only bishops can ordain people to be priests, and Wesley was only a priest. But he desperately needed to appoint new church leaders for new churches in America. Eventually, Wesley fell back on the fact that there’s no difference between bishops and priests in the New Testament, and he started carrying out ordinations himself. Sadly, but inevitably, this led to the development of Methodism as a separate movement.

Other developments in Protestantism

Time for a few brief mentions of some other trends in Protestantism. The Enlightenment of the 18^th century had a huge impact on Protestantism. It led to the development of liberal approaches to theology, which applied human reason to scripture and tradition. Scholars started to study the Bible as a collection of historical texts for example, and to ask searching questions about the reasons why faith developed as it did. People have often associated this approach with doubt and with the gradual loss of faith. But it has also greatly helped people to understand the Bible in its own context and to ask important questions about how the Church should relate to a rapidly changing world. I’ll say more about that next week.

Finally, the most recent set of new Protestant churches has resulted mostly from Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement, as I mentioned two weeks ago. Some of these have settled down into established denominations. And others come and go rapidly as individual congregations and as shifting alliances of churches.

Catholics since the Reformation

But I really must say some more about the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church worked hard in the sixteenth century to renew and strengthen its vision, in a movement known as the Counter-Reformation. And they held another council of bishops, this time at Trent over the years from 1545 to 1563. Sadly, Trent completely rejected any possible compromises with the Protestants, and restated the Catholic faith in a way which was even more confident of many of the things that the Protestants didn’t like. But Cathlics also worked hard to tighten up administration and discipline and to get rid of corruption in the church.

New religious orders such as the Jesuits, founded in 1540, had a huge impact. And Catholics got their act together in taking the Christian message to the world long before Protestants did. When Catholic countries like Portugal and Spain were exploring the world, Catholic missionaries went with them. Protestant missionary work didn’t really get going until the 18^th century and the evangelical revivals.

On the whole, the Catholic Church followed its own triumphant, separatist approach to faith, regarding itself as the one true Church. In 1870, the First Vatican Council proclaimed that the Pope on his own has the authority to make infallible pronouncements of Christian doctrine, an innovation which did nothing to placate the Protestants and the Orthodox.

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church was able to re-establish its hierarchy of bishops in England in 1850. And the Church of England was greatly changed by the anglo-catholic revival of the 19^th century, which emphasised the Catholic heritage of Anglicans. And many began to hope for reunion or at least for mutual recognition between the Catholics and Anglicans. But the Pope responded in 1896 by saying that the ordination of Anglican priests is ‘absolutely null and utterly void’

But a huge change came in the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council. For the first time, Catholics affirmed that Protestants really are Christians. It became possible for Catholics and Protestants to worship together, and a new era of ecumenism began. A new form of the Mass was produced, which was translated into people’s own languages, instead of Latin. Ordinary Catholics were encouraged to read the Bible themselves. And there was a lot of shared liturgical scholarship conducted by Christians of different denominations. Anglicans and other Protestants rediscovered some of the patterns of worship of the first millennium, while also starting to use contemporary language in their services instead of all those 16^th century ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s. The result was that it became possible to find Eucharistic services in Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran and other churches which looked and sounded very similar.

In many ways, the 20^th century brought a lot of reconciliation between the divided denominations. It became much more normal for Christians of different kinds to worship together and to seek to serve God together. Congregationalists and Presbyterians in England and Wales, for example, joined forces in 1972 to form the United Reformed Church. Christians have at least partly healed many of the divisions of the past.

But recent times have brought a whole new set of questions and challenges to the church. The ordination of women by Anglicans is a great barrier to ecumenical relationships with the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, which firmly believe that only men can be priests. And arguments over same-sex relationships are prominent among many Christians. Those are some of the issues which I’ll be discussing next week.

This talk was given in Downing College Chapel on 20 February 2012 as part of the Theology for Beginners series.

Click here if you would like to listen to a recording of this talk.

This week’s talk is rather dramatically entitled: ‘Death, judgement, Hell and the Kingdom of Heaven’. Which I think will be a good way of distracting you from the temporary hassles of week 5.

In my first talk, I made a case for regarding theology as a meaningful and rational subject  which shows the true context for all areas of knowledge. In the second week, I described what Jesus has done in the past to reveal God to us in a personal way, and to make it possible for us to have a relationship with him. And last week I described what the Holy Spirit does in the present, looking at the Christian experience of God.

This week, I’m looking ahead. I’ll be talking about Christian ways of understanding the direction of our lives and of our world. What are God’s purposes for us and the universe? And what is the meaning of life?

My answer to that question draws on some of the themes from the earlier talks. In the first talk, I said that there’s a central idea in theology which can help to make sense of everything else. And I described it like this:

The theory is that there’s a loving, intelligent power which has created the universe and holds it in existence, sustaining all its physical processes. And that this God has configured the cosmos so that it brings forth conscious, intelligent life. That this one rational mind which underlies the whole of reality has provided an environment in which other rational, conscious beings can arise. And the reason for creation is that God is loving.  God wants there to be other beings who can experience love, and who have the opportunity to develop relationships of love with him and with each other. But no one can be forced to love. And so, within this divine purpose, there’s a genuine degree of freedom for us. We’re able to grow as authentic, individual people. And to make real choices. To choose to join in with God’s creative purposes, or not to. To choose to be loving and courageous, or selfish and fearful. But God seeks to inspire us to grow in love and in virtue, and to take delight in knowing and loving him and each other. That’s the central, big idea of theology. A loving creator who seeks to bring forth consciousness and love. And today’s talk looks at where that process is leading.

In my second talk, I introduced the central theme in Jesus’ teaching, the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is the form of life that develops when the guiding rule of divine goodness is fully acknowledged and embraced. Jesus Christ began his ministry with this announcement: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near. Repent, and believe in the good news.’ And Christians believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection overcame the evil of the world. He brought a great reconciliation between people and God. He made it possible for people to live in a relationship with God, and for the whole of God’s creation to be brought into a harmonious unity with God

And in my third talk, I described the work of the Holy Spirit in sanctifying individuals, enabling us to grow in love and in holiness. Becoming more like Jesus Christ in our character, while developing our own unique gifts and personalities.  So I’ve been telling different aspects of a long story of creation, of reconciliation and of transformation.

And at the moment, the Kingdom of God is growing. It’s growing in the lives of individuals, and in the world as a whole. For now, this is a gradual progress, and the world remains a tangled mixture of good and evil. But Christians believe that Jesus will one day return to complete his inauguration of the Kingdom of God. The dead will be raised, and he will judge all the human beings who’ve ever lived. And he will destroy all that remains opposed to him and his kingdom

And so the day will come when the Kingdom of God fills this world and is established in all its fullness on this earth. People and God will be drawn together in a wonderfully close relationship. The glory of the Lord will fill the whole world. And this great transformation will bring a far deeper, richer experience of beauty, goodness, love and community. It will open up many new possibilities of exploration and discovery which will delight our minds and hearts. That therefore is the big picture of the future of God’s creation and God’s people.

And there I’ve briefly introduced the great themes of judgement and eternity, as they’re described in the New Testament. I’ve outlined something of how I see them. And I’ll return towards the end of the talk to explore that view in more detail, with a look at some of Jesus’ teachings.

But the great themes of judgement and eternity are part of another of those areas of religious thought in which people have formed a range of very different views. There are a number of different ways in which life after death is described in the Bible. And a number of different ways in which Christians have interpreted those ideas. So I first want to describe some of that fascinating and sometimes rather confusing history.

You may have noticed that there are some words I haven’t used yet, apart from in the title. I’ve talked about the resurrection, judgement and the Kingdom of God. But I haven’t mentioned ‘heaven’ or ‘hell’. Or ‘purgatory’. Because the Bible doesn’t mention purgatory, and it doesn’t use the words ‘heaven’ or ‘hell’ in the ways they have come to be commonly used by Christians. I’ll get to those ideas in due course. But I’d first like to focus on the vocabulary of the scriptures. So, to begin with, I’ll be talking about Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, resurrection, judgement and the Kingdom of God.

Eternal life in the Old Testament

Let’s begin with a look at the Jewish faith described in the Old Testament. The Gospels often describe lively debates between Jesus and the various leaders of the Jews. And one of the biggest controversies of the day was the debate over the possibility of a future life. The Pharisees believed in a future resurrection of the dead, and the Sadducees didn’t. And they argued about it a lot. That disagreement illustrates the fact that a belief in resurrection is only fleetingly present in later books of the Old Testament. The Sadducees only regarded the first five books of our Old Testament as authoritative, and so they had no belief in eternal life.

Large parts of the Old Testament are really quite bleak about our future. Ecclesiastes says: ‘The fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.’

Various places in the Old Testament mention Sheol, the realm of the dead, but not in any kind of positive way. Psalm 6 says: ‘In death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?’

And Psalm 88 says:

‘For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol.  I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help,  like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.’

Sheol is a kind of shadowy realm of the dead, where some vague spiritual echo of human beings persists. But it’s certainly not somewhere where anyone would like to be, or which has any real hope attached to it.

So the book of Deuteronomy condemns those who try to contact ghosts or spirits or to seek oracles from the dead. This is abhorrent to the Lord, it says. And one of the worst things that bad King Saul does is to ask a medium to summon the spirit of Samuel. The only message which Saul gets in reply is a severe telling off and a pronouncement of God’s judgement.

For the Jewish thought of the Old Testament, the focus is very much on this world and this life. And people’s hope for the future very much centres on their children. Their real hope of living on is through their descendents. So there’s a huge emphasis in parts of the Old Testament on having as many children as possible, with men having as many wives and concubines as are necessary in order to do that. A lots of long genealogies. The Old Testament is very strongly focused on our mortal life in this world.

And there’s something of an internal debate between different books about whether or not that life is fair. Books like Job and Ecclesiastes are protesting bitterly that it isn’t. And this is a big problem for faith. Sometimes the innocent suffer and the wicked flourish, and sometimes God doesn’t seem to do anything about that injustice. This problem of evil is a dark mystery for most of the Old Testament. There isn’t a hope that God is working towards a better future in a future life for individual people or for the world.

The first hints of a change arise towards the end of the period in which the Hebrew scriptures were written. The Book of Daniel says that Sheol will one day give up its dead. ‘Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.’

So after Sheol, the realm in which the dead sleep, comes a hope for resurrection. And a warning of judgement that is associated with resurrection. Some will be given everlasting life, but some will receive only shame and contempt.

And this is the basic biblical vision of life after death. Notice that I’m still avoiding saying ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’. The vision is of a kind of shadowy existence in Sheol, or a deep sleep, followed in later thought by a future resurrection. And resurrection means reappearing on this earth in a new physical body.

That’s the view seen in the Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish text written probably just before the time of Jesus. It was widely read in the early church. It talks of the ‘souls of the righteous’ being at peace, and looks ahead to a future resurrection and a transformation of the world. It says: ‘In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble. They will govern nations and rule over people, and the Lord will reign over them.’

The New Testament

So that’s the basic framework which the New Testament inherits. In a similar way, St Paul writes about those who have ‘fallen asleep in Christ’,[1] and he looks ahead to their resurrection. Resurrection is very significant in Paul’s theology. It’s important to him that Christ has been raised from the dead, for this is the event which prefigures and enables the future resurrection of all the dead. So the New Testament is on the side of the Pharisees in their debate against the Sadducees. It presents a strong faith in resurrection.

And the New Testament continues to talk about ‘Sheol’. But it translates that Hebrew word using the Greek word  ‘Hades’.

So we’ve reached the New Testament and I still haven’t mentioned ‘heaven’ or ‘hell’. It’s about Hades and resurrection, not really about what happens to our spirits between death and resurrection. But the Jews had begun to develop a sense that this sleeping in Sheol or Hades might be a different experience for different people. A resting in peace for those who will be vindicated in the resurrection. And a troubled sleep for those whose who will wake to shame and contempt. That distinction is seen in the Book of Enoch, a Jewish text from about the first century BC. Enoch describes different sections of Sheol, where there are different experiences of reward or punishment. It suggests that people’s experience in Sheol anticipates what they will experience after their future resurrection.

And Jesus seems to refer to that kind of idea in one of his parables, when he mentions Hades. It’s in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in chapter 16 of Luke’s Gospel.

Lazarus had been poor, and the evil rich man had refused to help him. And after death, they’re both in Hades. But Lazarus is with Abraham, and the rich man is on the other side of a chasm, within sight of him. Lazarus is in a good place and is happy, but the rich man is in torment.

Now, this is a parable. And the point of it is actually the story which Jesus goes onto to tell about how the living would never pay attention to warnings from the dead. This isn’t Jesus setting out a systematic account of life in Hades. But there’s at least a symbolic reference to the idea that the sleep of the dead in Hades might have different qualities. It’s one of the very few places in the Bible which says anything at all about what happens between death and resurrection.

Revelation chapter 6 is another one. It gives a picture of the souls of the martyrs crying impatiently to God for the day of judgement to come. They want to see justice done on those who killed them, but they’re told that they will have to rest for a while longer. And 1 Peter briefly says that Jesus, between his own death and resurrection, went to ‘make a proclamation to the spirits in prison’. Many Christians have interpreted this as meaning that he went to see the souls of those who had died before him in order to bring them the benefits of salvation. But there’s otherwise very little mention in the New Testament for what happens between death and resurrection.

Overwhelmingly, the hope that the Bible and the creeds of the early church point towards is that of waking up again on earth in a new body. The scriptural understanding of human beings is very much that we are a unity of body and spirit. A spirit which exists without a body is a pitiful, stunted form of life, barely human. Sheol or Hades is not where you want to be. All the hope is of a future bodily resurrection.

The influence of Plato

But most Christian spirituality has moved in a very different direction since the Bible was written. And to explain that, I need to grumble about Plato for a while. Because a lot of Christian spirituality doesn’t come from Jesus Christ or the Bible, it comes from Greek philosophy.

There’s a good reason for that. In the first century, Christianity burst beyond the boundaries of the people of Israel and spread rapidly through the surrounding world. But Greek philosophy had got there first. The intellectual landscape of the Roman empire was dominated by it. And it was Greek philosophy which provided the concepts and the methods for intellectual people to analyse and make sense of the message of Christianity. Most of the great theologians of the early church owed a lot to Greek philosophy. So people had big arguments about whether Jesus was of one substance with his father or of a similar substance. In Greek, that’s a choice between homo-ousios and homoi-ousios. That was the kind of distinction that Greek philosophy trained you to make. And some of this theological analysis was extremely helpful, and some of it was probably a rather unhelpful distraction. As keen evangelists, the first Christians needed to explain the Gospel within the language and ways of thinking of the culture of their hearers. But perhaps they sometimes took rather more from the surrounding culture than they should have done. Tertullian, at the end of the second century, was in the minority when he grumbled: ‘What has Athens got to do with Jerusalem?’

Anyway, onto my grumbles about Plato. Plato had a very distinctive view of the cosmos. For Plato, this physical world is a pale reflection of a greater reality, which is a spiritual realm. And so many of the thinkers influenced by Plato developed a very negative view of matter. They had a very negative view of this physical world and of our human bodies. They blamed the body for all our evil desires, our uncontrolled appetites and our painful illnesses. And they saw this physical world as the place of danger, mortality and decay. But they believed that the soul is inherently immortal and has its true home above. The soul truly belongs in an eternal spiritual realm of purity, goodness, peace, truth and unchanging perfection. For Platonists, the bad news was that the human soul has been imprisoned for a time in bodies in this nasty world of matter. But the good news was that the soul can be elevated through philosophy, through the contemplation of truth and beauty and the pursuit of wisdom. And that it can eventually find its way home.

Now that view of the world and of human nature is very different from the cosmology we find in the Bible. Life in all its fullness, for the authors of the Bible, involves walking around in a human body, enjoying the shade of the trees, drinking fine wine and feasting together at great banquets. But life in all its fullness for the admirers of Plato involves being a disembodied soul in a spiritual realm. A spiritual realm which is seen as far superior to this messy physical one. This Platonist view can be very attractive to people who are keen on intellectual activity and the cultivation of the inner life, such as theologians and mystics.

So that Biblical picture of the state between death and resurrection as Sheol or Hades began to be replaced. That rather sketchy idea of some kind of sleep or partial existence began to give way to a Platonic view. A view which thought it would actually be great to be without a body. And Christians began to imagine the dead going to a spiritual realm which is greater than this world. A place… and I’m going to say it at last, called… ‘heaven’.

Most Christians don’t realise that the Bible never mentions the idea of people’s souls going to heaven when they die. It’s such a popular part of Christian spirituality. But it’s got a lot to do with Plato and very little to do with Jesus Christ. And so it’s rather confusing that it’s come to be the main way in which Christians talk about our hope for the future.

It’s true that the Bible often associates the skies above us with the glory of God, using ‘heaven’ as a poetic way of talking about the transcendent presence of God. And so Christian theologians, over time, came to imagine that the goal of the Christian life was for souls to find their way up into that higher, perfect, spiritual realm.

A big part of the confusion in most people’s minds is a way that the word ‘heaven’ is sometimes used in the Bible, especially in Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew has a distinctively pious aversion to using the holy name of God, and prefers to get round this politely by saying ‘heaven’. It is a bit like saying ‘Downing Street’ instead of the name of the Prime Minister, or ‘The White House’ instead of the name of the President. So Matthew’s Gospel says ‘Kingdom of heaven’ where the other Gospels say ‘Kingdom of God’. This has led to many Christians falsely assuming that the Kingdom is something which happens in heaven, not on earth. But Jesus’ teaching is very much focussed on this world and his future return to it. The Lord’s Prayer in Matthew’s Gospel says: ‘Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ It asks for God’s Kingdom to come here, not for us to go to heaven. And people also often misunderstand the promise of a great reward prepared for us in heaven. This is simply a way of saying that a great reward is being prepared for us by God, while politely avoiding using his name. Saying that there’s a present for us under the Christmas tree doesn’t imply that we’re going to go and live in a heap of pine needles and wrapping paper. And mention of a reward in heaven doesn’t imply that we are going to go and live in the sky.

The whole idea that heaven is a perfect, eternal, spiritual realm is not at all biblical. St Paul even wrote about spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. And various passages in the Bible make it clear that the heavens were created with the earth, and will need to be renewed and transformed when the earth is. Isaiah, 2 Peter and Revelation all promise that there will be a ‘new heaven and a new earth’. None of which fits at all well with Plato’s idea of a perfect, eternal, spiritual realm. And the Greek words we translate as ‘heaven and earth’ could just as well be translated as ‘the sky and the ground’. God promises a new heaven and a new earth, which means a new sky and a new ground. Which is a vivid way of saying that he’s going to renew the whole cosmos. The real Christian hope is focussed on what God is going to do with his creation. Not on the idea that he is going to rescue us from it and take us somewhere spiritual.

Hell

So that’s enough about ‘heaven’ for now. It’s about time I mentioned the other place. By which I don’t mean Oxford, I mean ‘hell’. And I get to be rude about Greek philosophy a little bit more. Because it’s that same kind of Greek philosophy which has given Christians the belief that the soul is inherently immortal and indestructible. That’s another idea which isn’t found in the Bible, and it leads to some disturbing consequences when it’s imported into Christianity. What happens to the souls who haven’t found salvation on earth, who haven’t responded to God’s invitation to be part of his Kingdom? They can’t go to heaven, but they have to go somewhere because they are indestructible. And the traditional answer, of course, is a place of everlasting punishment called hell. A place where the torment of the damned goes on forever. I find this view of hell utterly, horribly, unthinkably, unbearably cruel. The idea that some bad choices made during a few finite years on earth could lead to an infinite period of punishment is utterly immoral. I worry that it leads to a view of God as a vicious sadist. It seems to me that Jesus’ view of hell is a warning of irrevocable destruction rather than a threat of everlasting torment.

Because the main word in the New Testament which gets translated as ‘hell’ is Gehenna. And Gehenna was a rubbish dump outside Jerusalem. It was place where rubbish was incinerated, which was a swift and efficient way of getting rid of it. Jerusalem produced plenty of garbage, so the fires kept on burning, but any individual piece of rubbish wouldn’t last very long. So the fires of Gehenna are a vivid warning about destruction, rather than endless retribution.

It’s still a very serious warning, however.  In Matthew chapter 10, Jesus says: ‘Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.’  (Or in hell, as it’s usually translated). Clearly, Jesus didn’t believe that souls were inherently immortal. And he’s giving a vivid warning about destruction, not about everlasting vindictiveness. So when he talks about judgement in his parables in Matthew chapter 13, he talks of a harvest when the weeds are thrown onto the fire. And of a sorting out of fish in which the good fish are put in baskets and the bad fish are thrown away.

Overwhelmingly , the New Testament is making a contrast between the two possible fates of life and death. So John 3.16 says: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’ And Paul says in Romans 6: ‘The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ The contrast is between death and life, not between an eternal life of torment and an eternal life of joy.

Purgatory

So I’ve discussed the development of beliefs in heaven and hell. And it’s time now to deal with what is possibly the most controversial subject in the whole of Christian history: Purgatory. The row about purgatory was at the heart of the biggest division in Christian history, the split between Catholics and Protestants at the Reformation in the 16^th century.

As I’ve said, it’s from Plato, not Jesus, that we get the idea that our goal is a perfect spiritual realm. A place which Christians have come to call heaven. But the Platonic picture of heaven presents us with another puzzle. If heaven’s perfect, how on earth are people like us going to fit in? Getting into heaven must certainly depend on God forgiving us, and the cross can give us confidence in God’s forgiveness. But getting in is only part of the problem. What’s going to happen when we’ve got there? Surely, we’re just going to mess it all up again? We’ll be forming little cliques and factions, and gossiping, and arguing about who’s got the biggest halo.

It’s a tricky question. Now the early Christians soon became confident that people who died as martyrs were ready to go straight to heaven. The martyrs had obeyed Jesus even to the point of death. So they’d let go of everything which they’d previously loved more than God. They’d been fully transformed and had become like Jesus in their deaths. But what about everyone else?

In Plato’s philosophy, souls get reincarnated many times before they finally manage to attain perfection and to reach the heavenly realms. Christians have never adopted a belief in multiple reincarnations, but the logic of Platonism seems to demand something rather like that. Instead, Christians developed the idea that there was somewhere where imperfect souls were being purified and prepared for heaven. They came to make a distinction between the dead saints who’d already become perfect, and those souls who were still on their way there. And so Christian spirituality came gradually to include the practice of asking the saints in heaven to pray for us on earth. And praying to God for those souls who hadn’t yet reached him. All those ideas are important features of Catholicism.

And so, over the centuries, there developed a belief in Purgatory, a place where the dead are made ready to come face to face with God in heaven.

Now, there are some things about Purgatory which seem to me to be quite logical and helpful, and those are ideas which I shall come back to. At its best, purgatory is a belief in a process of healing and purification, in which people are taught to give up their remaining addictions to sin. What I like about this idea of purgatory is the way that it connects with and completes the process of transformation which can begin in us now. It joins up with the process of sanctification in this life, the process whereby we can gradually learn to love God and love one another. And so it shows that this process of transformation is very important. It says something about the meaning of life now as an opportunity to grow closer to God. And a belief in Purgatory at its best provides a place for the idea that our learning and growing in love can continue even after death.

Unfortunately, the medieval Catholic view of purgatory was turned by some into the greatest religious money-making scam of all history. Purgatory came to be expressed in terms of a vast period of punishment which had to be endured before a soul could enter heaven. But the medieval Catholic Church also claimed to have the power to reduce that sentence. Particular prayers, rituals and pilgrimages could supposedly knock many years off a person’s future spell in purgatory. And so could the purchase of an expensive document called an indulgence. Or the wealthy could pay for the Church to pray for their souls after they died in order to speed their way through purgatory. And so vast sums of money poured into the Church as people sought to buy their way onto the fast track to heaven. This highly profitable approach to faith was light years away from Jesus’s belief that the Kingdom of God belonged to the poor. And it obscured the belief that purgatory was supposed to be meaningful, indispensable and valuable process of learning for the individual.

It was Martin Luther who began the Reformation by protesting against the sale of indulgences. He asked why the Pope wouldn’t simply speed everyone straight through purgatory free of charge if he really had the power to do so. The Protestants who broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century did so with a deep sense of disgust at the ways that some Catholics had turned the Gospel of Jesus Christ into a source of cash. They noticed that purgatory was not mentioned in the Bible and were therefore very glad to abandon the whole idea. Subsequently, the Catholic Church has shifted to a rather less punitive and exploitative view of purgatory, but the whole idea remains deeply tainted in the eyes of most Protestants.

Now, clearly, I think that the Catholic Church had gone badly wrong then, and that Luther and others were right to protest. I’ve said that the Bible seems to give very little emphasis to whatever happens to us between death and resurrection. And I’m suspicious of the use of Greek philosophy which leads to a belief in an eternal hell, a perfect spiritual heaven, and a purgatory.

But, in a way, the picture gets even stranger if you do what Protestants have tended to do. Most Protestants have taken the medieval Catholic picture of life after death and simply edited out Purgatory. This still doesn’t really match what the Bible says. And, without Purgatory, it makes very little sense. How can we sinful people go to a perfect heaven?

But most Protestants account of salvation focus on guilt and forgiveness. They focus on the idea that God forgives us through the cross, the act of justification. And they tend to say a lot less about sanctification, the process whereby God transforms us. If we’ve been forgiven, in Protestant theology, we can get into heaven.

And Protestant theology therefore just tends quietly to assume that we will somehow become perfect in an instant in order to enter God’s perfect heaven. But there’s nowhere in the Bible which talks about individuals being made morally and spiritually perfect in an instant. Nevertheless, Protestants seem somehow to assume that this is will happen. We’ll go to heaven and everything will be immediately perfect. This is a real point of weakness in Protestant theology.

Now, it seems to me that the Platonists’ perfect spiritual heaven makes no sense at all without a process of transformation. The Platonists’ perfect spiritual heaven requires reincarnation or purgatory or something, because the vast majority of us won’t be ready for it by the time we die.

And if God really can instantaneously make us spiritually and morally perfect, what does that mean? In what sense am I still me if God totally transforms me in an instant? And, more importantly, if he really can do that, why doesn’t he just do it now for everyone? Why do we have to live through this world of pain and ambiguity and risk? Why not just all get instantly zapped and taken to heaven?

It’s all a bit of a muddle, it seems to me.

And, of course, I’m mostly blaming Greek philosophy for the muddle. Because the New Testament seems to me to present a picture which is much clearer and more helpful. That’s the picture I described at the beginning of the talk. And so, for the final part of this talk, I’m going to go back to that picture. It’s time for a closer look at the teachings of Jesus.

The teachings of Jesus

So what Jesus actually talked about was resurrection, judgement and the Kingdom of God coming on earth. Good Christian theologians of all kinds, Protestant and Catholic, have always believed in those things. But they’ve often spent a long time thinking about what happens to souls between death and resurrection, and have got rather distracted by ideas about heaven, hell and purgatory. I’m not alone in pointing that out, and I’m drawing on a lot of the best biblical scholarship which has been done in recent times. And the view I’m presenting connects with the things I mentioned at the beginning of the talk. The idea that we and our world are a work in progress. That God’s loving purposes for his creation are continuing. And that the growth of the Kingdom of God is something which will transform us and renew the whole of God’s creation. So let’s look at some of Jesus’ parables about the Kingdom.

Jesus described the Kingdom as something which has small beginnings, but comes to dominate its surroundings. He said that it was like a tiny mustard seed which grows into a great tree. Or like the little quantity of yeast which is mixed into flour and which makes all the bread rise. And so the Kingdom involves a gradual transformation of the world around us.

But the Kingdom is also something which describes the attitude of people’s hearts, as they learn to love God and to love each other. So Jesus said: ‘The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the Kingdom of God is within you.’[2] ‘Within’ here also means ‘among’, so it describes something which happens within our hearts and within our relationships.

And Jesus described the Kingdom as something which wise people would be overjoyed to find. He said that the Kingdom ‘is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.’ So, it would be worth letting go of everything else in order to take hold of the Kingdom of God. To be part of the Kingdom of God means joining in with God’s great project to transform the world, bringing love, peace, celebration and joy. It means letting go of shallow selfish ambitions. And it means learning the delight of putting our talents and energies to use for the good of all. Although it leads to eternal life, it can’t be found by those who are primarily seeking self-preservation. The eternal life of the Kingdom is found by those who are willing to see their egocentricity put to death while they humbly serve a far greater vision.

And so the news of the Kingdom gets a mixed reaction, as Jesus describes in his parable of the sower. [3] Jesus compared the announcement of the Kingdom of God to the way that a farmer might scatter seeds widely in a field. Some seeds fall on good soil and grow into plants which bear much fruit, while other seeds fall on the path and are simply eaten by birds. Similarly, some people are very receptive to the message of the Kingdom, and the result is that goodness and love are multiplied in their lives many times over. However, others choose not to respond at all. Jesus also mentions seeds which fall among thorns and only grow a little: they are like those who accept the message at first, but are distracted by ‘the cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things.’

Since it is up to us how we respond to the message of the Kingdom, Jesus’ parable highlights the significance of our choices. The invitation is directed to everyone, just as the farmer scatters the seeds widely and indiscriminately. As St Paul wrote, ‘God desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.’[4] God would like to include all humanity in the life of the Kingdom of God, but the parable shows how the freedom he’s given to us means that some choose to join in and some don’t. Some barely notice or barely pay attention to the light of Christ in the world, while others respond enthusiastically to what they see and hear of God.

There’s therefore a difficult tension between God’s longing to welcome the whole human race into his Kingdom and the fact that our responses vary so much. Some people resist the coming of the Kingdom, while others live in a way which supports its growth. The advance of the Kingdom is for now held back by the need to provide space for all those who haven’t chosen to join it. But Jesus’ teachings contain the urgent warning that the present opportunity to decide for or against the Kingdom won’t last forever. God’s eager to take his creation forward to the next stage of its development, a time when the Kingdom of God will fill the world and when all people will be united. The time for decision is drawing to an end.

Jesus said that he would one day come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and that then his Kingdom would be fully established on earth. He described the resurrection of the dead which will happen at the same time. Which means their reappearance in this world as whole, physical people in new bodies. Jesus said that the time will come when ‘the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God… All who are in their graves will hear his voice and will come out – those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.’[5]

The Bible presents that time as a remaking of the world. And all those, present and past, who have learned to live as part of the Kingdom, will enter a glorious new chapter of their existence. And all the ways in which present and past generations have grown in love and used their gifts for the common good will be brought together in this transformation of the world. But all those, present and past, who have turned away from the Kingdom will be removed and destroyed.

Some people will be utterly delighted to see the coming of the Kingdom of God, and will recognise within it the fulfilment of all the glimpses of beauty, goodness, love and truth which they have responded to in their lives. But others will be disappointed and furious to find that a more powerful force than their own will is sweeping aside their own limited plans.

So who exactly are these two groups of people? Jesus’ parables seem to indicate a last judgement which has many surprises. Christians have often wanted to tidy this up. They’ve often insisted that anyone who conforms to some particular set of Christian beliefs or practices must thereby officially be one of the righteous with an admission ticket to the Kingdom. And that all others must be utterly lost. But Jesus’ descriptions of the day of judgement seem to be designed to unsettle the proudly religious. He said: ‘On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?” Then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.”’ People who’ve been busy preaching dramatically and claiming all kinds of miraculous powers may still have just been serving their own egos. They may still have failed to follow their true calling with love and humility, and may have never really known God. Even official Christian leaders may not be truly a part of the Kingdom. The Kingdom may turn out to be very different from the small private empires they were eagerly building up. Many actions done in the name of Jesus or beliefs proclaimed about him will turn out to have had nothing to do with him at all.

However, Jesus also spoke of others who would discover at the judgement that they had been serving him without consciously realising it. He said that he would thank them for feeding him when he was hungry, for welcoming him when he was a stranger, for clothing him when he was naked, for taking care of him when he was sick, and for visiting him in prison. These people will be bewildered and delighted to discover that they had been following him and becoming part of his Kingdom through their experiences of love and goodness. Matthew’s account of this says:

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?  And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing?  And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’[6]

Compassion and humility count for far more than grand displays of religiosity. But, as people who’ve often sat tests and exams, we probably find ourselves wondering if there’s some kind of pass mark, some kind of necessary quota of good deeds which we’re supposed to achieve to earn our admittance to the Kingdom of God. But that idea isn’t found in the Bible. In the passage just quoted, those who are identified as righteous are not those who have been deliberately trying to pass some kind of test, but those who have been genuinely loving without thinking about a reward.

What seems to matter most to Jesus is not some remarkable list of accomplishments, but a humble sense of our own need of God. Being a proud member of a religious tradition has no value in itself; it is much more important to have an honest awareness of our own problems. We need to know our need for forgiveness and we need an openness to the ways in which God wants us to grow. In Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector, he indicated that it was the humble, repentant tax-collector who was accepted into a relationship with God, rather than the proudly religious Pharisee.

An interesting example involves one of the thieves crucified alongside Jesus. At the very end of his life, the thief confesses his guilt, accepts that he deserves his fate, but asks Jesus to remember him in his kingdom. And Jesus comforts him by promising him a place in paradise. Jesus doesn’t look for perfection, or an impressive CV, or some kind of pass-mark of holiness. He looks for people who are at some stage of a journey of getting to know God, a journey which they are eager to continue.

So we can’t earn a place in the Kingdom of God, but our decisions and actions, up to the very end of our lives, show whether or not we’d be happy to learn to live in harmony with the King. A change of heart is possible even in our last moments.

But someone who leads a life of crime and only turns to God just before death will be far less well prepared for the Kingdom than someone who’s lived seventy years of adventurous generosity, humble service and heart-felt devotion to God. Jesus often referred to the fact that some would be first and some would be last in the Kingdom. He said repeatedly that people would experience different rewards.  St Paul said something similar, writing that our works would be tested by fire and that some of the things we have achieved now would last and be rewarded, and some wouldn’t. [7]  This suggests that there is more to our membership of the Kingdom than just the yes/no response of whether or not we join in with it. There’s a journey of learning and transformation which some have travelled much further along than others. Some become very advanced in the ways of the Kingdom by the time they die, while others may still be beginners. Some, like Paul, will rejoice to see people in the Kingdom of God who are there because of their words and deeds. They will look around them and rejoice to see what God has done with their labours. And others will be happy to be there, but will realise that that have wasted most of their lives.

Final objection to Plato’s view of perfection

Which leads me to what I promise is my final grumble about Plato. And this is that the heavenly perfection imagined by the Platonists doesn’t have any place for people to go on doing things or learning things. Perfection is just perfection. But Jesus’ view of the Kingdom is far more dynamic, far more varied and far more exciting than that. There’s plenty more still happening and changing in the Kingdom of God, even after the last judgement.

Jesus’ parable of the pounds illuminates these themes very well.[8] He describes a nobleman going away to receive a kingdom, leaving his servants to look after his money and to do business with it. He entrusts different amounts to different servants, and returns to find that they have made use of it in very different ways. Some have traded it and earned much more money, while one has simply hidden it away. With his new royal authority, the ruler distributes new responsibilities in his kingdom according to how faithfully his staff have served him during his absence. To one, he says, ‘Well done, good servant! Because you have been trustworthy in a very little, take charge of ten cities.’ He puts another in charge of five cities, but takes the money away from the servant who has done nothing.

There’s no place here for a Greek image of a static state of heavenly perfection. Jesus’ parable suggests that there is much more work to be done in the Kingdom of God. Those who’ve learned to serve God in small ways may be put in charge of cities when Jesus returns. This image suggests that life now is a kind of training ground, in which we have the opportunity to put to work the talents which God has given us. We have the opportunity to use them faithfully, lovingly, humbly in the service of our divine master. If we do that, then we grow into the kind of people he is hoping for. And he will then be able to put us to work in positions of far greater responsibility. And, if we have grown into people who love to do good, then we will take great delight in having new opportunities and new challenges.

So the things that we learn now and the ways that our characters develop now are important. The talents and virtues we develop now are of great significance. We’re on the first stage in a journey of discovery, love, adventure and service which can continue beyond this life. If we’re happy to be part of the Kingdom, and to put our talents and our energies to good use, then there are far greater labours and rewards still to come. The transition from looking after ten pounds to looking after ten cities is a big leap. And the promised future isn’t a state of unchanging perfection, or of uneventful rest, but one of continuing activity, growth and discovery. There will still be problems to solve, plans to make, places to explore, buildings to construct.

Other places in the New Testament talk of a future in which Jesus’ followers reign with him on earth.[9] And that implies that there will be decisions to make, projects to manage, and that there will be other people who look to us to guide them, to teach them and to nurture them. At various different stages, the process of learning, doing and loving will continue.

So there will be those who will be first in the Kingdom of God because they’ve learned much in this life about the ways of the Kingdom. They’ve already grown to be holy, loving and humble in this life. And there will be those who’ve only just begun to respond to God who will be last in the Kingdom of God. It seems to me that both kinds of people will have more to learn and will continue to grow in love for all eternity. And those who are first will help to nurture those who are last.

What I’m suggesting there is that the best features of the Catholic view of purgatory can be included in a view of the Kingdom of God. If we can abandon that Platonic ideal of unchanging perfection, then we can make much more sense God’s project to transform people. We can understand more about the Kingdom of God and about God’s project to transform the world.

The meaning and purpose of life

So what does this mean for us now? What is the meaning of life? Life now is our opportunity to become part of the Kingdom of God, to learn to love, to learn to serve humbly, to develop our characters, and to encourage and nurture others in the ways of compassion and wisdom. In doing so, we will be building for the Kingdom, and our actions will have an eternal significance. The more that we adopt the values of the Kingdom of God now and seek to live in harmony with the King, the more that he’ll be able to work through our acts of generosity, kindness, creativity and love. And then the ways in which we affect other people’s lives for the better will be caught up in the transformation of the world which is the coming of the Kingdom.

At the end of the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth is represented by the image of a beautiful city coming down from heaven to earth. The city will be decorated with every precious stone, with a radiance like a very rare jewel. And it will be illuminated by the shining brightness of the glory of God. People and God will live together in a new and wonderful harmony. It’s a poetic account of perfect, divine beauty being revealed on earth, as the glory of God blazes forth for all to see. But this divine glory doesn’t simply overwhelm the works of human beings. For the same passage says that the kings of the earth will bring their glory into the holy city, and people will bring into it the glory and the honour of the nations. It’s an amazing image which suggests, I think, that all that is good and true and beautiful in our world will be gathered up into this holy, divine city, and then used to transform the world. God’s glory doesn’t obliterate the beauty which we see in our own work and in our creativity; it embraces it. God rejoices to see the ways in which our lives can grow to reflect his glory. And all the good things of this world will be caught up into the wonder of the Kingdom of God.

That is the future which God invites us to, and we anticipate that future whenever we do something beautiful for God; whenever we make something, or sing something, or do something which will be joyfully included in the holy city; whenever we gladly serve God and work with him to build for the Kingdom of God. We anticipate that future whenever we help others to see the beauty of the Lord; whenever we can bring hope and comfort and dignity and joy to those who face hardship and fear; whenever God’s glory is seen in our actions, our relationships and our words. All our acts of goodness join in with God’s work of building his Kingdom, and all that is good has a lasting place within it.

Ending

So that concludes my account of the meaning of life and the purpose of the cosmos. These first four talks have given a speedy journey through the main themes of Christian theology, from creation to the last judgement. Over the next two weeks, I’ll look in more detail at history of the differences between the various churches and theological traditions, and the dilemmas faced by Christians today. And then I’ll look at ways in which people of different faiths can understand and relate to each other.

This talk was given in Downing College Chapel on 13 February 2012 as part of the Theology for Beginners series.

Click here if you would like to listen to a recording of this talk.

Last week, I talked about the Christian understanding of God as Trinity – as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And I talked about how the second person of the Trinity – God the Son – became a human being. I talked about how he did this in order to bridge the gap between divinity and humanity – enabling us to know God, to know God’s love and forgiveness, and to be drawn into a relationship with him. Jesus is the personal revelation of God. And I described his proclamation of the Kingdom of God, and his crucifixion and resurrection.

So Christian theology says that the second person of the Trinity has given the world this personal revelation of God. He’s made it possible for us to have a relationship with God. But there’s more. For Christian theology also says that the third person of the Trinity – God the Holy Spirit – has come to dwell within us. And there are various very dramatic ways of picturing what that means.

The disciples on the Day of Pentecost heard a sound like a violent wind, and then saw tongues of fire resting on them. And they gained the ability to speak in other languages, and a new confidence in proclaiming the message of Jesus. They were so excited that those around them asked if they were drunk. As a result of their enthusiastic preaching, three thousand onlookers became Christians that day. And the whole community of believers were so full of love for God and for each other that they gladly shared all their possessions with those in need. They were filled with enthusiasm for sharing in prayer and worship together.  A sceptic might see those accounts as biased an unhistorical, but it’s an undeniable historical fact that Christianity spread very rapidly from those early beginnings. Something happened which inspired and energised a great many people as Christian disciples. Something happened which made them willing to risk even persecution and death for their new-found faith.

The New Testament speaks of people being filled with the Holy Spirit. Or immersed in the Holy Spirit. Drenched in the presence of God. It says that this experience is available to anyone. Whereas God had previously worked through his Spirit in only some people at some times and in some places, the New Testament describes the Spirit being poured out for everyone. And whereas the people of God in the Old Testament had experienced the presence of God especially within the Temple in Jerusalem, the New Testament describes individual Christians becoming temples of the Holy Spirit. God himself has drawn near to dwell within people.

In this week’s talk, therefore, I’m going to be talking about what it means to be filled with the Spirit. I’m going to talk about the Christian experience of God.

It’s important to note that the Spirit, like Jesus, is presented in the New Testament as being divine and being a person. The Spirit isn’t just some kind of strange psychic energy field. Jesus calls the Holy Spirit ‘he’ not ‘it’, and sees the Spirit as equivalent to himself. He describes the Spirit as another advocate, or counsellor, or comforter. A person who will care for us and inspire us. So the Spirit comes to inspire us, to strengthen us, and above all to build relationships. He’s a person who seeks to build our relationship with God in a personal way.

So that implies three things. Firstly, the Spirit is not just a kind of extra boost of energy. He’s not like a very strong coffee, or a performance enhancing drug – he’s a person.

Secondly, being filled with the Spirit is not like being possessed by some kind of alien intelligence or demonic power. He seeks to build relationships, not to seize power over us or to obliterate our personality. The Spirit brings love, not dictatorship.

And thirdly, it’s very likely that there will be some aspects of the experience of the Holy Spirit which different people will have in common, and some aspects which are different. That’s how relationships work. Any relationship depends on the personalities of both of the two people involved, and the circumstances under which they meet and the ways they get to know each other. That’s true of the ways in which Christians experience the Spirit.

In all this, therefore, I think there’s room for a healthy pluralism. Different people will experience the Spirit in different ways, just as different people will perceive the same person in different ways. There isn’t one authorised set of emotions or human responses which indicate an authentic encounter with the presence of God. I’m going to be talking about different Christian views of how we experience God, and it seems to me that different Christians have much to learn from each other.

After all, the Spirit is offered to everyone. The Spirit is there to equip the whole church. Not just to provide special private experiences for particular individuals. The Spirit’s there to draw all people together into a closer relationship with God.

Evangelical spirituality and the charismatic movement

But some of you will know that the Holy Spirit is a controversial subject in evangelical Christianity today. If you look at the big Cambridge evangelical churches which are attended by students, one of the main differences between them is their understanding of the Holy Spirit. People at St Andrew the Great, for example, have a very different view of the Holy Spirit from the people at City Church. At City Church, they emphasise the importance of Christians seeking to be filled with the Spirit, seeking to have a real, dramatic, life-changing experience of the Holy Spirit. Seeking to exercise miraculous gifts, such as speaking in tongues and prophesying. And seeking to worship in a way which provides a powerful emotional, spiritual experience – singing for long periods in which one song flows into another, and into times of spontaneous prayer. At St Andrew the Great, you’ll find a very dignified sense that the job of the Holy Spirit is to help us to understand the Bible better. Powerful spiritual, emotional experiences for individuals and groups are not really talked about or encouraged. Songs are sung one at a time, with a clear explanation from the leader of the theological point which the song is making. The emphasis in the service is on teaching, on understanding the message of the Bible.

There’s a big divide among evangelical Christians about the understanding of the Holy Spirit. And it’s associated with a division between ways of understanding human beings and understanding how we encounter God. One side is interested in miracles, spiritual experiences and worship which engages the emotions very strongly. And the other wants to give all its attention to a very disciplined and rather unemotional approach to understanding the Bible. Both groups believe in the authority of scripture and in the reality of a relationship with God. But one side expects that relationship to be highly experiential, while the other expects it to be focussed on the mind and the understanding.

This is a distinctively Protestant dilemma. And Catholics tend to look at it with some bafflement. Catholic faith and spirituality has always had a place for the experiential and the miraculous, within a clearly defined theology. Catholics have always had a belief in saints who see visions and heal the sick, and a strong sense of a miraculous encounter with God in the sacraments. I’ll say more about that later.

But Protestant Christianity has this very distinctive focus on the Bible. An emphasis on the importance of understanding the message of the Bible for ourselves. An emphasis on being saved by faith, and a tendency to understand faith as something that’s all about believing the right set of ideas. That approach can therefore lead Protestantism in a direction which is very focussed on the cognitive dimension of Christianity. It’s about our intellects and our thinking. And if the Holy Spirit is mentioned at all in that context, it will be in the role of supporting our understanding of the scriptures. After all, Jesus said in John’s Gospel that the Spirit, the Advocate, would teach us everything and remind us of all that he had said.

Protestant churches have also been strongly influenced by the great intellectual movement of the 18^th century, the Enlightenment. Which placed great emphasis on rationality, and was somewhat suspicious of emotion. For many 18^th century Protestants, ‘enthusiasm’ was a very negative term and a deeply offensive insult. To accuse someone of ‘enthusiasm’ was to suggest that they were wild and crazy and irrational. Christianity was seen as a collection of sensible, rational facts.

But Protestant churches have also been strongly influenced by reactions to the Enlightenment, such the Romantic movement. Which stressed the importance of emotion, art, poetry, music, passion and the inner life. And the 18^th century saw the beginnings of a series of evangelical revivals in Britain, America and elsewhere. These emphasised that God was there to be experienced by everyone. They emphasised the importance of the individual’s decision to respond to Jesus’ offer of salvation. They emphasised the importance of a real, heart-felt, commitment to God. These revivals often involved huge open-air meetings where evangelists would preach to great crowds. And where the enthusiastic responses of the crowds reminded people of the events of the day of Pentecost. Evangelical Protestantism grew very rapidly among ordinary people in Britain and America in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, bursting beyond the boundaries of the previous denominations. This gave evangelical Christianity an interest in faith as something to be experienced, a dimension which had been somewhat lacking before. And with it came a new sense of the Holy Spirit as a miraculous presence, there to inspire and to guide people.

The traditional Protestant establishment disapproved. Joseph Butler, a Church of England bishop, famously said to John Wesley in 1739: ‘Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’

But this enthusiastic, experiential evangelicalism continued to grow. In the early 20^th century, a new movement called Pentecostalism began. Pentecostal Christians read the New Testament accounts of life in the early Church and believed that much of modern Christianity had lost the power of the original Christian experience of the Holy Spirit. They looked very carefully at the ways in which the Holy Spirit is described in the New Testament. And they declared that any Christian should expect to have a very powerful experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit. And that this would lead to miraculous gifts, such as speaking in tongues, healings and prophesies. They believed also that this closeness of the Spirit should lead to radically holy lives, and to the transformation of individuals by the love of God.

Pentecostalism usually led to new churches being established, or breaking away from old denominations. But a new development came in the 1960s and 70s called the Charismatic Movement, in which elements of Pentecostal spirituality and theology spread into the traditional protestant denominations, and in some parts of the Catholic church. The term ‘charismatic’ refers to the Greek word ‘charisma’, meaning gift, the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

So evangelical Christianity as it’s found today in Cambridge inherits a range of views on the Holy Spirit and on the importance of spiritual experience and emotion in the Christian life. All evangelical churches stress the importance of individual conversion and faith. But on the one hand, there’s the very disciplined classical Protestantism of some churches like St Andrew the Great. And then there are churches which are influenced to different degrees by the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, emphasising an encounter with the Holy Spirit which is a genuine spiritual and emotional experience.

Gifts of the Spirit

In the New Testament, Paul describes the work of the Holy Spirit according to gifts and fruit. I’ll get to the fruit later. But he says that there are various different gifts, all from the same Spirit, and that they are given to different people in different ways for the common good, for the building up of the whole church. These include prophesy, words of wisdom and knowledge, teaching, encouragement, healing, the working of miracles, distinguishing between spirits, speaking in tongues, the interpretation of tongues. He says carefully that what matters most, however, is love.

Speaking in tongues is a phenomenon which seems to have occurred throughout Christian history in various degrees. But it’s especially associated today with the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, which value it very highly. Those who speak in tongues find that they are saying unfamiliar words which often somehow express their deepest feelings to God. It can be a very beautiful and helpful aspect of an individual’s prayer life. It is similar in a way to something else which Paul says about the Spirit, in Romans 8: ‘The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.’

Whether it’s in sighs too deep for words, or in speaking in tongues, there’s a Christian experience of prayer in which we may feel that God himself is within us helping us to express ourselves in prayer. This draws us into the life of the Trinity, for we pray in the power of the Spirit through Jesus the Son to God the Father.

In some charismatic churches, people are encouraged to speak or sing in tongues during worship. And others may seek to exercise the spiritual gift of being able to interpret the meaning of those words as a message from God. And others may come forward with what they believe are prophesies from God. Such churches may also frequently pray for people to be healed, and may also have a strong sense that they are engaging in so-called spiritual warfare – seeking to rebuke and drive out powers of evil from people and from places.

This spiritual fervour can turn into something which seems quite irrational and chaotic. Which is why other Protestant traditions often react against it. The greatest contrast to the charismatic movement is a belief called cessationism, the idea that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit were withdrawn when the writing of the Bible was finished. The Biblical support for that view is extremely tenuous at best, but many evangelicals who claim to base their beliefs on the Bible are very wary of the charismatic movement.

I would simply like to say that both sides have found something genuine about the Bible, the Spirit and human nature. The best charismatic churches seem to be the ones which have a confident theology of biblical revelation, so that there’s a healthy mixture of structured teaching and real experience. I do think that God relates to individuals and to local churches in specific ways, and seeks to guide them and to inspire them. I also think that there’s a real place for our emotions, our imagination and our intuition in spirituality and worship. The charismatic movement seems to me to be good at recovering such elements.

Sometimes, however, it can go too far. I’m very sceptical about most of the claims of miraculous healings I’ve ever come across. And a great many so-called prophecies seem to me to be obvious and trite. Charismatics can feel a need to keep generating more and more powerful emotional experiences in their services which creates a bubble which eventually bursts. I’ve met quite a few burnt-out ex-charismatics who now take refuge in very peaceful, reflective services.

It seems to me that Jesus calls us to love God with our hearts and our minds. And good Christian spirituality should draw on theology, wisdom, thoughtful reflection and common sense as well as emotion, intuition and enthusiasm. I think that all our faculties have a place in our relationship with God.

Sanctification

Have discussed the argument between charismatics and non-charismatics, I’m now moving in the direction of some of the contrasts between Protestant and Catholic theology.

Whereas St Paul says that the Spirit gives different gifts to different people, he also talks about the fruit of the Spirit, which is given to all Christians. And this fruit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. In the same way that a tree will slowly bear fruit, so a Christian who lives by the Spirit will gradually bear this fruit. This is a process of being gradually transformed from within by the presence of the Holy Spirit. And it’s something that happens little by little, as the Spirit teaches us through all the events of our lives, day by day. Through all the choices we make, if we’re attentive to the Spirit, we can grow in virtue and become gradually more like Jesus Christ. More loving, more faithful, more joyful, more patient, and more generous.

In Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Galatians, he makes a strong contrast between a life of obedience to the Law, as described in the Old Testament, and the life of the Spirit. Christianity isn’t meant to be a religion of rules and detailed regulations – it’s, above all, a relationship of love. There are indeed moral ideals we should learn to pursue. But the Christian life is meant to be one which is increasingly filled with love and inspired by love, guided by the Holy Spirit. Christianity is about gradually developing a Christ-like character. And that’s not an obsessive attention to regulations, but a life which is increasingly filled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. This is a central part of the work of the Spirit in the process which is called sanctification – the process of making us genuinely holy.

Protestant theology is usually extremely careful to distinguish between justification and sanctification. Justification is the event in which God forgives us and declares us to be righteous, on the basis of Christ’s work of salvation. Even though we’re sinful, God accepts us as if we were righteous. Sanctification is the process whereby we actually become righteous.

However, Catholic theology presents justification and sanctification as much more interconnected, emphasising the importance of a real change in us as our relationship with God develops. And Orthodox theology, from the churches of the east, talks of theosis or divinisation, a process whereby the divine image is restored in people, and we join with Christ in partaking in the divine nature.

Many Protestants place little emphasis on sanctification in their theology, emphasising that our continued sinfulness is inevitable. But for Catholics and Orthodox Christians, it’s this process of being made holy which will lead us to heaven. And if that process isn’t complete in this life, it will continue after death, which is what Catholics call purgatory. I’ll be talking next week more about the theme of eternal life and how that connects with our present experience.

High-church and low-church

But for most of the rest of this talk, I’m going to be exploring the differences between what you might call a low church and a high church understanding of the Christian experience of God. I’m using the term high church here to mean taking a high view of the Church and its traditions. And that means having a very optimistic sense that God has inspired the Church’s history and the development of its doctrines and practices. That the forms of worship which have developed over the centuries have been inspired by God and are therefore important. That places can be significant and that church buildings can be genuinely holy places. And that the hierarchical structures of the church are significant, following a pattern revealed by God.

Tradition means handing on – it’s the process whereby we receive from the Christians before us beliefs and practices which have seemed to them to be holy and important.

Now ‘tradition’ tends to be seen as a rude word among those who are low church. To be low church means that you think that the Church has tended to keep on going astray and messing things up. That most of its outward forms of worship and liturgy are at best only of secondary importance, and may be revised and discarded by anyone at any time. And that its doctrines may have badly gone wrong over the centuries. So that what matters most is the original Christian message contained in the Bible. From a low-church perspective, we should always simply seek the most direct and straightforward way of living out the message of the Bible in whatever context we find ourselves in.

It seems to me that both traditions have strengths and weaknesses. Each tends to focus on some aspects of the ways in which we experience God, and to neglect others. The high-church view is good at cherishing the whole history of how God has inspired his people. And the low-church view is good at being open to new things which God might call us to do today in response to the central teachings found in the Bible.

There are three major problems with the low-church view’s lack of interest in history and tradition. The first is that the Bible didn’t simply fall out of the sky in a finished form. It was the Church which wrote the books of the New Testament, and which decided which books belonged in it. This process of deciding which texts had authority was one which didn’t fully converge on an agreement until the fourth century. So the Bible took shape within a long, historical process, alongside other developing traditions. Which makes it impossible really to separate completely the Bible from the Church and its traditions. It’s far too simplistic to say that the Bible is good and the Church and its traditions are bad.

The second problem with the low-church view is that Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would be our teacher. And he said that it was actually to our advantage for him to leave so that he could send the Spirit to be with us. That surely must mean that we should take very seriously all the things that Christians claim to have learned from God over the last 20 centuries. We should expect there to be some elements of continuing revelation. I get especially baffled by today’s charismatics who are quick to say that their churches contain prophets who are speaking the words of the Holy Spirit, but seem to think God was mostly silent from the day the ink dried on the Book of Revelation until the present day. Surely an interest in the Spirit should lead to a keen interest in the history of the Church?

The third problem with the low-church view is that every Christian reads the Bible through a set of assumptions given to them by their tradition. Low-church Christians spend a lot longer listening to sermons than they spend listening to the Bible being read. They spend a lot longer listening to someone explaining a particular approach to interpreting the Bible than they spend listening to the text itself. They may not realise it, but their beliefs are being nurtured within one particular Christian tradition. So, if you look at the CICCU doctrinal basis, for example, you’ll see a framework which tells you how to read and understand scripture. The CICCU doctrinal basis has 11 points, one of which says that the Bible is authoritative and infallible. And if that meant what it seems to mean, then it ought to be enough simply to say that the Bible is authoritative and infallible. But actually, that point on its own isn’t sufficient to define the conservative evangelical tradition of CICCU. Which is why there are another ten points. CICCU doesn’t just believe in the Bible, it believes in a very distinctive conservative evangelical way of reading the Bible.

So people who are low-church tend to believe that they’re following the one obviously correct way of reading the Bible and not any kind of tradition. But their Bible comes from within the traditions of the Church. And their way of reading it comes from within whichever particular tradition of Protestant theology they happen to inhabit.

So I think that there are problems with a low-church approach which just talks about us and the Bible. It tries to ignore 20 centuries of tradition, but is often blind to the ways in which it is formed by its own tradition. And it’s strange to try to ignore 20 centuries of the history of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church. I think there’s a lot which the low-church view can learn from the high-church view.

But the high-church view has some problems of its own, and has much to learn from the low-church view. One problem is that the Church really does get things badly wrong sometimes. Perhaps quite often actually. And, yes, God is faithful and keeps trying to get us back on track again. But we do mess things up. The inquisitions and sales of indulgences in the Medieval Church, for example. Or the unquestioned anti-semitism found among Christians of all kinds for many centuries. Or various unsavoury alliances with nasty dictators and corrupt regimes. Or the triumphalism of many different denominations and factions who have been happy for the church to be disunited. It really does seem to be vitally important to keep rereading the Bible and asking: does what we’re saying and doing here really look like something that Jesus would have done? I’m very sceptical about the Roman Catholic view that the Church is itself infallible. It seems to me that the Church really is always in need of some reformation.

The second problem with the high church view is that God may well be calling us to do new things, not just to keep repeating the old traditions. The Spirit looks around this fast-changing world and sees the opportunities and challenges which are different from those faced by those who went before us. The Spirit knows the full potential of the present moment. There may be new ways of living out the fundamental values and truths of the Gospel. It’s not enough just to keep on doing the same things. It’s not good enough just to say that we’re not going to have women bishops today because we’ve never done it before. And there’s much more we need to do to connect with people today than just singing choral evensong, lovely though it is.

So, it seems to me that there are advantages and disadvantages in both the high church and the low church approaches. The Spirit can be seen at work in the Bible, in the history of the Church and in people today. And we have much to learn from each other.

Sacraments: baptism and the eucharist

I shall say more in the fifth and sixth talks about the history of the Church and the development of different approaches to theology in the past and to the dilemmas we face today.

But let me turn now to an aspect of Christian spirituality which tends to be mentioned more often by those who take a high church approach. The sacraments. Anyone who’s a Catholic or a high-church Anglican will know exactly what I’m talking about. Anyone who’s low-church may not be so sure.

There are two sacraments of the Gospel, which are particular physical actions given to us by Jesus to do in worship. One is baptism, which involves water. The other is the eucharist, also known as the mass, Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper or the breaking of bread, which involves bread and wine. Since the Middle Ages, Catholic and Orthodox Christians have believed in another five sacraments as well, making a total of seven: those are confirmation, ordination, marriage, the anointing of the sick and the practice of confessing sins to a priest and receiving absolution. However, I shall focus here on the two sacraments of the Gospel which nearly all Christians accept.

These are particular physical actions which Jesus commanded his followers to take. A good Anglican definition of a sacrament is to say that it is an ‘outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace’. But Christians vary in how that is understood. A lower-church view says that what really matters is the faith of the individual. And the sacrament is a way of proclaiming that faith and deepening that faith. A higher-church view says that God has given the sacraments to the Church in such a way that we can be sure his grace will flow whenever we celebrate them. So the physical action of the sacrament actually, objectively causes something to happen. The physical matter and action of the sacrament actually changes us in some way.

In the case of baptism, lower-church people are much more likely to be hostile to the idea of the baptism of babies and young children. From a very low-church perspective, the act of baptism is meaningless unless the individual involved really has embraced the Christian faith for themselves. The majority of Protestants, however, still baptise babies, as the Church of England does. We believe that it’s meaningful to baptise the children of Christian parents, because children naturally are formed by the beliefs of their parents. And so a child can be brought up as a member of the Church. But a higher-church perspective also suggests that the act of baptism will be an objective source of grace for the child, whatever the beliefs and spiritual state of those involved.

When Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3 that no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit, different Christians interpret that verse in different ways. The lower-church view likes to talk about being born again, using that to mean the change in an individual associated with their decision to have faith in Jesus. The higher-church view emphasises that the water Jesus mentions is baptism, and says that the work of the Spirit is strongly linked with the act of baptism. The lower-church view is talking about the faith and spiritual experience of the individual; whereas the higher-church view is also saying that something objectively happens through the physical action of baptism, cleansing the candidate from sin. The low-churchperson suspects that the high-churchperson has some kind of superstitious belief in magic water. While the high-churchperson thinks that the low-churchperson doesn’t understand the ways that the Spirit makes himself graciously present through the sacraments of the Church.

And in the case of the Eucharist, a lower-church understanding tends to focus on the faith and the experience of those participating. At the lowest end, the bread and wine are seen as rather like visual aids, props which help to remember Jesus and to think about him. So that those who have faith can find that their faith is deepened. But a higher church understanding says that there is a real, physical encounter with Jesus Christ in and through the Eucharist. That Jesus himself is present in and through the bread and the wine.

Jesus said at the last supper: ‘Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ And the high-church view tends to focus on the words ‘this is my body’. While the low-church view tends to focus on the ‘remembrance’ idea there.

In John chapter 6, Jesus says: ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever… Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.’

A lower-church view will understand Jesus to be talking symbolically about his death and about our faith in his death. But a higher-church view insists that this passage in John’s Gospel must have been written with the Eucharist in mind. It insists that our encounter with Jesus Christ in the Eucharist is central to the identity of Christians. And it says that Christians are those who eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus Christ.

The higher-church view goes back a very long way, from the period even before the New Testament canon was finalised. From the early centuries of the Church, Christians have used sacrificial language to talk about the Eucharist. Believing that the Eucharist actually joins us to the one perfect sacrifice of Christ made on the cross. So that, in a sense, Christ’s body and blood are being offered to God for us on the altar at every Eucharist. That doesn’t mean that Christ is being crucified again, but that the sacrifice of Christ is made genuinely, physically present for us, in our midst. We are genuinely, physically and spiritually united across space and time with the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

Christians have always wondered about the details of how that might work. And so the Roman Catholic Church, especially through the work of the 13^th century theologian St Thomas Aquinas, came to define the presence of Christ in the Eucharist as transubstantiation. Aquinas was using the philosophy of Aristotle, which was the best available science at the time. And Aristotelian philosophy allows a distinction to be made between the outward form, or accident of something and its inward substance. Medieval Catholic theologians analysed the Eucharist in detail and concluded that the outward form of the bread and the wine remained the same, but the substance changed into the body and blood of Christ. Catholics understand that change to happen at the moment when the priest repeats the words spoken by Christ at the last supper.

From a very low-church point of view, the bread and the wine are symbols which only have significance because of the ways they help us to think about Jesus. But from a high-church perspective, Jesus is physically present in and through the bread and the wine. And Catholics consider it right and proper to treat the bread and wine with the reverence they would show if meeting Jesus face to face.

What should we make of all this? It seems to me, again, that both perspectives have got something. But I worry that both sides have tended to over-analyse things and to react against each other. It seems to me that there is something real, powerful, awesome, wondrous and objective about what God does through the bread and wine of the Eucharist and the waters of baptism. But it seems to me that our response of faith is also very important. It’s a relationship, in which both sides matter. It also seems to me that there’s a physical encounter with Jesus Christ in the Eucharist which is the closest I get to having a hug from God. I believe that Jesus took on human flesh so that people really could meet him 2000 years ago. So that people could use their human senses to connect with the reality of God. And I think that physical miracle continues in and through the Eucharist. That God chooses to use physical matter to relate to me, because I’m a physical creature with sense of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. And the Eucharist engages all those senses very profoundly.

But I don’t think that the medieval Catholic use of Aristotelian metaphysics is actually very helpful. No one else really thinks of matter in terms of accidents and substances anymore. And since I don’t believe in Aristotelian philosophy, I don’t believe in Transubstantiation as it’s been defined by the Roman Catholic Church. I also don’t like the idea that you can take the whole event of the Eucharist and localise the miracle in a few of the words and in some of the matter. I think it’s the experience of the Eucharist as a whole which is important. And that this really is a meal at which God make himself present in a way we can perceive with our senses.

So, I think that the Catholic theology of the Eucharist had developed into something rather odd by the Middle Ages. But I would support the higher-church view of the Eucharist which could be found in the theology of the early Church. And it’s quite interesting to look back at the history of how Christians have understood the Eucharist.

Sacramental theology and early Christian worship

The Acts of the Apostles talks of Christians meeting on Sundays to break bread together. And we know that by the second century, if not from the very beginning, it was clearly understood that celebrating the Eucharist was what Christians did every Sunday.

Here’s the earliest known account of a church service, written by Justin Martyr sometime in the mid second century. He says:

‘On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and… when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given.’ – First Apology, LXVII

And it means a lot to me that his description matches very well what we do on Sunday mornings week by week in this Chapel. Those memoirs of the apostles he mentions – they’re what later became our New Testament. We read from them every week. And, as he says, I exhort people to follow their example in my sermon. We pray. And we give thanks over bread and wine and share it. This has been the pattern of worship for most of the world’s Christians throughout the last 20 centuries.

Justin also wrote this about the bread and wine:

‘Not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.’ – First Apology, LXVI

And so he’s making the point I introduced earlier. Jesus, who was humble enough to become flesh and blood for our salvation, is humble enough to be present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Now this is the basis of what can be called a sacramental theology, something which high-church people are more likely to talk about and which low-church people will scratch their heads at.

It says that God was happy to meet us in and through the human flesh of the person of Jesus Christ. God was happy to do something wonderful with the material substance of our world and our human nature. And, therefore, by extension, it sees God continuing to do something wonderful through matter in and through the sacraments of the Church. Matter is created to be good. And, though there is evil in the world, God can do things with physical stuff and with our human senses. Low-church people will tend to think that we encounter God mostly through invisible things: through prayer, through faith, and through our understanding of the Bible. High-church people tend to emphasise also that God is incarnational and sacramental. That we really do meet him in and through material things.

Low-church people can get very nervous about this, and worry that it’s idolatry or superstition. Or worry that people think they’re earning their way to God by rituals rather than having faith. But high-church people tend to assume that our faith is interwoven with the ways in which God allows us to experience him through our senses.

And so high-church people are often much more concerned to have churches and forms of worship which are filled with beauty and which engage our senses. The smell of incense and candles; the taste of full-bodied wine; the sound of beautiful music which is distinctively Christian; the sight of robes which have changed little since the fourth century, silver chalices, stained glass, statues, icons, lavish decorations, colours to highlight the drama of the seasons of the Church calendar; and the touch of physical gestures – bowing, kneeling and genuflecting. All of these are ways in which high-church people experience and respond to the presence of God.

And they speak of a shared history between God and people which is important. A married couple will have a shared history of particular ways of relating to each other, ways of speaking, significant days, special places, meaningful gifts as well as significant words. For high-church people, all the lavish traditions of the Church speak of a shared history and a relationship. A relationship between God and people which we can be drawn into.

I’m inclined to agree with that high-church perspective, as you’ve probably guessed. But I do think it’s possible to take it to unhealthy extremes. So I do think that the other perspective still has a great value, and that the Spirit speaks to the Church through it. It’s important to know that we can still meet God even if we only have an ugly concrete cell to worship in. It’s important to know that you don’t have to have expensive robes, or relics of saints, or visits to holy places in order to find Jesus. And it’s a big problem if people get obsessed with all the outward details of churchy paraphernalia and miss the inward point of a relationship with God. I think it has great prophetic value to have plenty of Christians who meet Jesus in the most humble, simple of settings. But I still think that there’s something very meaningful in making our worship beautiful and full of ways of engaging our senses.

It fascinates me that you can see something similar in the Old Testament – God reveals long chapters of descriptions of how to build a Temple, how to decorate it, how to make robes for priests, how to run all the ceremonies. And then people mess it all up and forget what it all really means, and God sends prophets to say that what actually matters most is faithfulness, righteousness, mercy and love. But God still gets them to have the lavish ceremonies again, and to rebuild the Temple after the exile. And the first Christians continued to worship in the Temple as long as they were allowed to. And, as soon as the Roman let them, they started to build beautiful churches.

Christian spirituality and the narrative of the Bible

I will end with a few final thoughts on Christian spirituality and the story told in the Bible. Much of what the Church does is all about helping people to encounter Jesus Christ in and through the narratives of the Bible which describe how God has revealed himself to us. The reading of scripture in public worship is very important. So is preaching, which seeks to bring the Bible alive, to explain it and to apply it. And so also are all the ways in which Christian worship seeks to help us to connect ourselves with that narrative. We re-enact the Last Supper at every Eucharist. When someone is baptised by immersion, as Paul wrote to the Romans, they are being buried with Christ when plunged under the water, dying to their sins, and then raised up with him to new life. We celebrate the incarnation, the coming of the light of Christ into the world, by the lighting of candles in a dark Chapel at our Advent Carol Service. And then we listen to a series of Bible readings which retell the story. And week by week we sing. A lot. We sing Psalms and canticles which come from the Bible, and songs which are strongly based on it. People go on processions on Palm Sunday to enter the experience of Jesus arriving in Jerusalem at the start of Holy Week. And they sit in vigil in darkened churches on the night of Maundy Thursday to remember his arrest and betrayal. In all these ways Christians seek to connect with the story of our redemption and to allow God to transform us.

To encounter that story, the practice of reading scripture as individuals, as groups, and as a global community of Christians is deeply important. Christians had limited access to this resource until the invention of printing three-quarters of the way through Christian history, and the age of mass literacy in the last two centuries. But it’s immensely valuable. Whether that’s the evangelical habit of the daily ‘quiet time’ of prayer and Bible reading. Or the more Catholic practice of the daily office, following the cycles of prayers and scripture readings from the Church’s lectionaries. Or meeting in groups to study the Bible. It’s immensely important.

And Christians frequently have the experience that God is speaking to them through the Bible. Although it’s not often that you can open it at random and find a verse which tells you exactly what to do. God might not want you to demolish the walls of Jericho or to go and fetch St Paul’s coat from Troas. It’s more that the Spirit prompts us to find ideas and examples and images which stick in our heads and nag at us. That particular passages move us and inspire us. That we find ourselves being drawn back again and again to people we identify with in the scriptures. Whether that’s Moses asking God to send someone else. Or Peter being forgiven by Jesus after abandoning him. Or the Psalmist ranting about his enemies. We find that we’re being drawn deeper into a relationship which others have shared in before us.

And that relationship, of course, is formed and nurtured by the Holy Spirit. As each of us gets to know God, we’re likely to find that we feel some sense of calling. That we experience God prompting us and nudging us in particular directions. Perhaps through our experiences of prayer, through reading the Bible, through conversations with others, through the life of the Church, we may find that we feel drawn to serve God in particular ways. For me, the greatest contribution of the charismatic movement is the insistence that every Christian has some kind of ministry. We’re not supposed to have churches where clergy do all kinds of amazing things and every else sits there looking impressed. No clergy, however brilliant, can carry such a burden. We’re supposed to have churches where everyone contributes to the common life of the community of faith by using all their gifts to the full. And that means that everyone should be actively asking God what he would like them to do. That all Christians should seek to encourage each other in using their gifts.

For this experience of the Holy Spirit is not given to us for our own individual comfort or excitement. The Spirit seeks to call and equip everyone to use their talents for the common good. To work together in the Church as people of God. And to seek to show the love of God to the world. So that in us and through us the Kingdom of God can grow.

Looking ahead

That brings me to the end of this week’s talk. Next week, I shall say more about the Kingdom of God and the meaning of life, and about judgement, heaven, hell and the purpose of the cosmos. And then in the following two weeks I shall say more about the differences between different kinds of Christians. First in the differences between the historic denominations. And then in the dilemmas and controversies we face today.

This talk was given in Downing College Chapel on 6 February 2012 as part of the Theology for Beginners series.

Click here if you would like to listen to a recording of this talk. If you listen to the recording, you might also like to scroll to the bottom of this page to read the discussion which has been posted here following the talk.

Introduction

Last week I sought to answer the question ‘What is theology?’ I defended theology against Richard Dawkins’ allegation that it isn’t really a subject at all. And I boldly suggested that theology can put all other areas of knowledge in their true contexts.

I described what I called the central idea of theology. The theory is that there is a loving, intelligent power which has created the universe and holds it in existence, sustaining all its physical processes. And that this God has configured the cosmos so that it brings forth conscious, intelligent life. That this one rational mind which underlies the whole of reality has provided an environment in which other rational, conscious beings can arise.

I said that the reason for creation is that God is loving.  God wants there to be other conscious beings who can experience love. He wants us to have the opportunity to develop relationships of love with him and with each other. But no one can be forced to love. And so, within this divine purpose, there’s a genuine degree of freedom for us. We’re able to grow as authentic, individual people. And to make real choices. To choose to join in with God’s creative purposes, or not to. To choose to be loving and courageous, or selfish and fearful. To seek to be close to God, or to ignore him. But God seeks to inspire us to grow in love and in virtue, and to take delight in knowing and loving him and each other.

I suggested that this central idea can make sense of the mathematical structures of the universe uncovered by scientists. And that it shows the importance of human consciousness, the nature of good and evil, the significance of beauty, love, relationships, history, ethics and literature.

So I described theology as a kind of top level of knowledge. Setting other subjects in context and showing their significance. I claimed that there are very good reasons for believing in God on the basis of what we can observe about reality. But those observations don’t tell us much about the nature of God himself, which I left as something of a mystery last week. There were quite a few questions last week which I answered by saying: ‘That’s what I’m going to talk about next week.’ So there’s a lot for me to say this time.

Because the main task of theology is indeed to talk about God. This week, I’m tackling the question of ‘What is God like and how could we ever know?’ And I’d like to start by pointing out quite how astonishing it is that anyone could claim to know about God in any detail. It reminds me of the start of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur Dent is introduced as a man who ‘no more knows his destiny than a tea-leaf knows the history of the East India Company’. For us even to suggest we might know exactly what God is like is more surprising than to think that the squirrels living in the trees outside might know all about Sir George Downing. We may well get a sense that there’s a beauty and a purpose and a coherent structure to reality which speaks of a creator. But that doesn’t put us in a position to claim to be experts about that creator.

And, while we’re more intelligent that squirrels, our intellects do have their limits. Even in Cambridge. It’s surprising to suggest that we might be able to comprehend a mind which is greater than the universe. It’s surprising to suggest that our ordinary human words might be up to the task of talking about God. And it’s surprising to assume that our thoughts might be able to get any kind of grip on the awesome vastness of God. However great our achievements, God is, by definition, far beyond us. And the difference between God and us is far greater than the difference between us and a squirrel.

Theology ought therefore to be nearly impossible. It can only operate at all if we can reasonably believe that there is some kind of way in which God has acted to make himself known to us. It’s only possible if God has, in some way, bridged the gap between him and us. It can only work if God has arranged reality in such a way as to allow him to reveal himself to us and to allow us to understand something of him.

Christianity has a very bold and dramatic answer to that problem, an answer which many other people find scandalous or baffling. At the heart of the Christian faith is the belief that God himself became a human being in order to bridge the gap between him and us, so that he could develop a relationship between him and us. He became a human being so that we could see him and know him and know what he is like. And he became a human being so that he could sort out in person the problems caused by the human tendency towards selfishness and sinfulness. Christian theology therefore believes both that God is transcendent, greater than the universe, far beyond our understanding, and that God has acted in the most dramatic and loving way in order to make himself known. It’s a bold and surprising claim. Almost as if William Wilkins, architect of Downing College, had been reborn as a squirrel in order to form a relationship with squirrels.

Revelation and mystery

I shall return to a detailed look at Jesus Christ soon. But I want to say some more about what seems to me to be the central difficulty and danger of all religious faith and theology. It’s almost impossible for us to talk about God without diminishing him in some way. Every time we say that God has acted in a specific way to make himself known to us in a form that we can understand, we’re taking a risk. And the risk is that we’ll simply grab hold of a small set of ideas about God and think that we’ve fully understood him. Every time we represent God by a neat and tidy set of statements, or instructions, or rituals, we’re in danger of worshipping an idol, or trying to domesticate God. We’re in danger of focussing on something which is far too small. We’re in danger of losing a sense of the grandeur, the wonder, the mystery and the infinity of God.

But there’s a risk in the opposite direction. For if we don’t see that God has acted in order to make himself known in ways we can understand, then we diminish him in another way. We make him seem distant, uninvolved, dormant and passive. And if we don’t talk about God at all, then we’re failing to pay attention to the most important aspect of our existence.

Good theology, like good spirituality, needs somehow to celebrate very loudly the positive ways in which we really have glimpsed God. At the same time as humbly recognising that there’s a lot more that we still have to learn. It needs to see that God has made himself known, and that God also remains far beyond us.  Theology’s very different from studying, say, fruit flies. The object of study in theology isn’t something smaller than us that we can dissect or do experiments on. We can’t scan God, weigh him or sequence his DNA. And theology’s very different from studying, say, multiplication. It doesn’t concern a process which is bound by a set of rules and axioms which we’ve defined. Theology concerns God, who is far beyond us, and yet has made himself in some ways accessible to us.

There should, therefore, always be a healthy sense of mystery and paradox about theology. It’s likely that there should always be multiple perspectives on the same complex truth. We should expect theology to be glorious, bold and exciting. And yet also to contain puzzles we can’t solve yet, and paradoxes which still baffle us. Theology will never be something we can perfectly master. Although God has made himself known to us, the full truth about him is still too big to fit in our heads.

Christianity’s personal and paradoxical view of God

And so I’m fascinated by the fact that Christianity describes God in ways which are both personal and paradoxical. I think that’s a very helpful combination, an account which reflects the greatness of God.  It doesn’t reduce God to something small and simple. It suggests that God has in some ways made himself knowable and accessible to us, while also remaining far beyond us and mysterious. It suggests that God is in some sense personal and relational, but not quite in the way that we’re used to persons and relationships working.

The description of God given by Christian theology contains two great paradoxes: the Trinity and the Incarnation. The first paradox is that God is both a single unity and yet is simultaneously also the three persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God is one, and yet also three. The second paradox is that Jesus Christ has always been fully divine, and has also become fully human. Don’t worry if those both went straight over your head, as I shall take some time to explore what they mean.

God is the single mind which underlies the whole of reality. He is the one creator of the universe who is made known to the people of Israel in the Old Testament. And yet, a Christian belief in God as Trinity indicates that he also exists from outside time and from beyond the universe as a network of loving relationships. He is, from all eternity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. So God is one but, paradoxically, God is also three. That sounds at first as if it’s just something which will give us a headache. A way of saying that God is incomprehensible. Or three incomprehensibles.

But, rather wonderfully, it indicates that consciousness, love and community are part of the complex nature of God himself. That’s why, as creator, he seeks to bring forth within the universe more and more examples of consciousness, love and community. The love of the eternal Trinity seeks to overflow in the creation of life. And God seeks then to draw conscious beings into the life of the community which exists within God himself.  God is not a single, selfish, ruthless, supreme power seeking his own will. But he is, by nature, love. He is, even within himself, a network of relationships. Within which there is mutuality, self-giving and delight.

Christians believe that we have glimpsed something of that divine love and community because God has sought to extend that love outwards to us and to welcome us in. And the central way in which he has done that has involved one of those three persons of the Trinity taking on our human nature and dwelling among us.

And so the central Christian claim is that God went to extraordinary lengths to make it possible for us creatures to relate to our creator. In order to make himself known to us in a form we could understand, God was born among us as one of us. In order to make a deep connection between humanity and divinity and to enable real relationships between people and God, the divine became human. This is called the Incarnation, the event in which the eternal Son of God took human flesh and lived among us. And so the second paradox is that Jesus, who exists from all eternity as the Son of God and the Word of God, also became a human being in the womb of Mary. He is and always has been fully divine, and yet 2000 years ago he also became simultaneously fully human.

So the Christian view of the personal nature of God is not a neat and tidy definition; it involves holding together several different ideas simultaneously which do not obviously fit together. God is three and God is one; and Jesus is both fully divine and fully human.

God is greater than us, and any way in which we compare him to people and to created things is always an over-simplification. So those two interconnected paradoxes are a complex pattern of ideas. They refuse to make sense in the kind of terms that we are used to. But they give a profound set of insights into the nature of God.

Some people would just laugh and give up at this point, dismissing this understanding of God as being obviously absurd. But you can find paradoxes like that even within the theories of modern science. Quantum mechanics is full of ideas which defy common sense. And physicists have long accepted the idea electron is both a particle and a wave at the same time, even though a ball of matter and a ripple seem like utterly different things.  From our perspective, even the properties of matter can be complex, surprising and paradoxical. It shouldn’t surprise us if God is even more surprising.

So there are paradoxes here, but also a very dramatic way in which God has chosen to make himself knowable, enabling us to relate to him. Jesus Christ has in his own person united divinity and humanity. He has created a real, personal connection between us and God. And so St Paul describes him as the ‘image of the invisible God,’ while also being the one ‘in whom all things hold together.’[1] He shows us, in human form, the character of God. To see him is to see God, as Jesus says in John’s Gospel. Yet, at the same time, he is also truly human. Jesus Christ shows what human beings can become, and what God intends us to become. He shows what human beings, raised to our full potential, can be. And he shows that we are at the heart of God’s plans for the universe.

So, in one sense, Jesus is God who has come among us to introduce himself. In another sense, he’s a man who pioneers a new and exalted form of humanity. He leads the way to show what we can become, and leads us in our response to God. In one sense, he is himself God. In another sense, he relates to God as we do. In one sense, he shares an identity and a unity with the divine mind which sustains the cosmos. In another sense, he exists within the cosmos as one who experiences the life of a mortal creature. Through him, God knows what it’s like to be human, and we see what God looks like as a person. And so he’s the mediator between God and humanity, the one who represents God to us and us to God. He is, as he said, the light of the world, the one who gives light to all people.[2]

Inadequate views of Jesus and the Trinity

These are complicated ideas to believe all at once. It’s normal for people to find them puzzling and frustrating at first. But many gradually learn to love the wealth of insights they give into the nature of God, and to realise that anything less just wouldn’t be good enough. It’s interesting to look at the discussions which people had in the early church in the first few centuries of Christian history. Because you can see people trying out all the more obvious, simpler ways of understanding God one by one. And then realising that they’re all incomplete and inadequate.

For example, it would be much more straightforward to believe that Jesus was a very good man who became very close to God. A holy person and a great prophet. And that God is just God, and that talking about the Holy Spirit is really just another way of talking about God. No Trinity. No humanity and divinity of Christ, and no paradoxes. That would be much easier to understand and would make perfect sense to everyone immediately. But that approach loses a large set of Christian insights into the character of God and the way he has chosen to relate to us. We’d lose the sense that God loved us so much that he became one of us. The sense that he understands human life from within. We’d lose the sense that God has been willing to get his hands dirty by stepping into the mess of human life in order to sort things out from within.  We’d lose the sense that Jesus Christ has the divine power to change human beings. And we’d lose the sense that God in himself is complex, paradoxical and is a community of love.

Seeing Jesus as human and God as a unity is the obvious set of oversimplifications, and it’s cropped up many times through history with various different names. But Christians have always rejected it, because it’s just not big enough to contain the ways in which we believe God has made himself known.

There are other ways in which people have attempted to simplify the astonishing mystery of the incarnation. One of the main competitors to orthodox Christianity in the early church was the idea that Jesus Christ was a sort of hybrid, half-way between God and people. The idea was that he was the created being whom God created first, rather like the most senior angel. Again, it would be easier to understand, and much more straightforward. But the Church, at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, insisted that Jesus Christ is fully divine at the same time as being as fully human. Not half divine and half human. They chose to stay with the paradox. If you’re familiar with the Nicene Creed that’s used in most churches, you’ll recognise these words about Jesus: ‘God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man.’

That’s the most famous and significant statement of the paradoxical Christian belief about God. Jesus is fully divine, of one Being with the Father. He’s God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. He’s not a created being, but he’s the one through whom all was created. And yet he became incarnate. He was made flesh. In the womb of Mary, he received our human nature and was made man.

There are other possible over-simplifications in the other direction. It would be much simpler just to say that Jesus was God in disguise. Some kind of divinely generated hologram through which God was able to have a conversation with us. But without actually sharing in our humanity. Again, much tidier and simpler, but that theory loses so much. For God, again, remains remote and untouched by our human condition.

A related oversimplification is the idea that God is spirit and that anything spiritual is good. And that this nasty world of matter, with all its change and decay, illness and pain, is bad. And that our goal should be to focus on being pure and spiritual, giving no thought for our bodily appetites. But a good Christian understanding of God says that God made this universe of matter with good intentions. And that God then chose to make our physical humanity a part of himself. So there’s something about being both spiritual and physical which is the way we’re meant to be. There’s a good potential in this world of matter which God is committed to.

But the Trinity remains baffling, and most intelligent Christians go through phases of wondering if it really helps. So another widespread oversimplification is the idea that there is one God who has acted in three different modes at different times. He has acted as the Father in creating the world. And then as Jesus in coming to redeem it. And then as the Holy Spirit in seeking to be inspire and guide us. But that oversimplification loses all of the sense of relationship and love within the godhead. It can’t deal with the ways that the Gospels show Jesus relating to his father and being filled with the Holy Spirit. It’s neat and tidy, but it’s not good enough.

So the paradoxes of the Trinity and the Incarnation offer a rich set of insights into the nature of God. But it’s important to realise that God hasn’t intended to reveal himself as a philosophical statement. He hasn’t intended to make himself known as a set of authorised doctrines. He’s revealed himself in a way which is personal, which is relational. And just as there’s no human being whose character and personality could be condensed into a set of perfect definitions, the same is even more true of God. The paradoxes of the Trinity and the Incarnation don’t allow us to replace God with a neat and tidy set of concepts. But they rule out ways of thinking of God which are inadequate. And they open the way for us to encounter God both as a person and as a mystery.

The Bible

I’ve been talking about ways in which God has made himself known. And I’ve focussed especially on Jesus Christ, the full, personal revelation of God. Christians understand Jesus’ incarnation to be set within a longer history of events on earth. It’s a history which includes the events described in the Old Testament, such as the calling of Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Law to Moses, the settlement of the land of Israel, and the hope of a promised Messiah. It’s a history which includes the events described in the New Testament, such as the ministry of the apostles and the growth of the early church. It’s a long history, which is described in the Bible.

But I’ve taken my time in arriving at a mention of the Bible, which is where some people might have expected me to start. Christianity is primarily about a person, and a history, and a set of relationships, rather than being about a book. What we have in the library of texts we call the Bible is a set of human documents which bear witness to that person and that history. They show how God called and prepared a nation of people; and how God became incarnate, and how that affected those who met Jesus Christ.

The Bible contains many different genres of texts. But the bulk of it is narrative. It’s describing a history and portraying a person through narrative. And the narrative is complex. It has many authors and it contains many different perspectives. There are two very different accounts of creation in Genesis, as I mentioned last week. And there are four Gospels, four very different portrayals of Jesus Christ. Even the main narrative of the history of Israel is told twice in different ways, with the books of Chronicles retelling the story from a different angle. Among all these ingredients, there are details  which really don’t fit together at all easily. And even some themes which seem to be arguing with each other.

And so in the Bible itself, there again seems to me to be something which speaks both of revelation and of mystery. There’s a very compelling and exciting set of accounts of God’s dealings with the human race. But it’s impossible to reduce it down to a simple set of statements. However well you know the Bible, there’s always something there to baffle you, to inspire you, to challenge you, to outrage you, to upset you, to reassure you and to make you think again. It works because it testifies to a person, a person who has walked among us, but who is ultimately more complex than any of our ideas. The paradoxes of the Trinity and the humanity and divinity of Christ are ways of pointing towards the different perspectives on God offered by the Bible.

But I do think that many Christians have often ended up saying some rather unrealistic things about the Bible. I feel disappointed when some Christians try to describe the Bible as infallible. Or when people end up treating it as if it consisted of scientific definitions, or legal statements or lines from a computer program. Such people often seem to me to miss something of the richness of the narrative of the Bible in their haste to derive a tidy set of doctrines from it. And well-intentioned, faithful Christians who take the Bible very seriously do still end up interpreting it in significantly different ways. I’ll be saying more about that in my fifth and sixth talks. Different people see different meanings in the same library of texts. So it seems to me to be an oversimplification to call the Bible infallible, when it is open to such a range of interpretations. And I worry that those who do so are actually missing some of the diversity, variety and richness of meaning which really is meant to be there.

But God revealed himself as a person, and the record of that revelation is a complex and varied collection of texts which are mostly narratives. He didn’t reveal himself as a neat and tidy set of definitions. And there’s a richness and a complexity about the nature of a person which I think the Bible reflects very well.  If we looked at any one of you and asked your friends and relatives to write about you, we’d get a wide variety of responses. People would identify with different aspects of your character and would know you in different ways. The same is true of God, I’d say. He’s personal and complex, and different people have understood different things about him. The Bible shows God through the eyes of many different people at many different times. And it shows people encountering him in the midst of all the messy realities of human life. That’s where its power lies. And that’s why it works so well.

So, it’s about time that I said some more about the narrative itself and the details of the Bible’s accounts of Jesus Christ.

The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ

The Old Testament shows that God has created us and made room for us to exist as real people with real choices. As a result we may choose to seek after God or to go in our own directions. It’s entirely possible to ignore God completely. And it’s entirely possible to live with very little thought for anyone else. As a result, there is evil in the world. Evil, selfishness, suffering and conflict.

But Jesus Christ came to inaugurate in this world a deeper form of human life, a better way of relating to God and to other people. He called this the Kingdom of God, which is the form of life that develops when the guiding rule of divine goodness is fully acknowledged and embraced. Jesus therefore began his ministry with this announcement: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near. Repent, and believe in the good news.’[3]

The Kingdom of God has come near, which means that it’s within our reach and we can accept an invitation to become part of if we wish. It’s a different way of life which is offered to us, a life which is lived in a relationship with God. It involves harmony between people and God where there was previously alienation. Becoming part of the Kingdom of God requires a change of heart, a process of repentance which changes our lives. And so the Kingdom of God is a transformation of people, of relationships, and of the world around us. In the fourth talk, I’ll look at how the Kingdom of God connects with eternal life and God’s purposes for the world. But to begin with, I need to describe the events which followed the proclamation of the Kingdom by Jesus Christ.

As God’s promised Messiah, Jesus Christ was establishing God’s rule on Earth. When people responded to him, he was able to set them free from their addiction to sin, so that they could live lives of hope and love, in harmony with God, unleashing their true potential. The Gospels are full of accounts of surprising encounters between Jesus and troubled people. When he unexpectedly came to stay with a corrupt tax-collector called Zacchaeus, his host then gave half his possessions to the poor and returned to all his victims four times the amount he had stolen. Jesus rescued a woman who was about to be stoned to death for adultery, by calmly suggesting that whoever was without sin should cast the first stone. He called ordinary, uneducated fishermen to be his disciples, and trained them up to take his message to the world.

Wherever he went, the tangled interactions of good and evil which shape our lives and our world became painfully, wonderfully obvious. His transforming presence pulled the fabric of reality into full alignment with the loving purposes of God. As a result, the sicknesses and frailties of our mortal human condition fell away from those whom he helped. The blind regained their sight, lepers were healed, the lame walked, and those with troubled minds and tormented souls gained peace and wholeness. The hidden potential of the world to leap forward into something greater was revealed.

Jesus showed love to people who were outcasts. He gave forgiveness to those who were tormented by guilt. He was not afraid to rebuke the rich and the powerful when their ways were evil. And through all his actions and words, he showed what God is like. And he showed the way that human beings should live.

And that uncompromising goodness put Jesus onto a collision course with all that is wrong with our world. With all our selfishness, our vested interests, our complacency and our failure to love. With all the corruption of human society. The four Gospels therefore tell a story of a confrontation which developed between Jesus and all the forces of evil within human beings and within the world.

This confrontation reached its climax in the betrayal, arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. He was betrayed to the Roman authorities by one of his disciples and abandoned by the others. He was subjected to unfair trials and futile interrogations. Crowds of people began to enjoy crying out for his death, although he’d never done any wrong. A great outpouring of evil from the foulest depths of the human heart called out for his destruction.

The soldiers stripped him naked, whipped him, mocked him, spat at him, hammered nails through his flesh, and lifted him up on a wooden cross to die. But throughout this time Jesus refused to resist.  He refused to argue. He refused to condemn. He refused to return in any way evil for evil.  Even amidst his own agony, he spoke words of forgiveness, understanding and compassion.

Alongside the terrible physical pain of a viciously prolonged form of execution, Jesus was abandoned and betrayed by friends, and mocked by those he had come to help. He entered the very lowest depths of human experience, overwhelmed by darkness. He lost even his sense of unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. And he screamed with the anguished horror of one who feels utterly alone. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ He shouldered the full, terrifying burden of human sin, the experience of being separated from God.

But his tormentors couldn’t make him hate. They did their very worst against him, and they couldn’t make him hate. In all the triumph of their evil, they couldn’t make him become like them. They couldn’t make him despise them in return for all their violence, or cry out for vengeance. ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,’ was his prayer for the soldiers who killed him. They broke his body, but his love remained strong. Although he died, he won the first part of a great victory over evil.

In this great confrontation between the goodness of God and the evils of the world, God himself suffered the consequences of human sin. It’s hard to take in how surprising that is. Not only did God descend to our level in order to make himself known; not only did he share in all the limitations and trials of human existence; but he allowed himself to suffer the full consequences of human evil. He allowed human beings to know him, to touch him, to kiss him, to betray him, to arrest him, to convict him, to torture him and to execute him.

But the narratives of the New Testament do not end there. They describe an astonishing bodily resurrection of Jesus two days after his death and burial. The New Testament authors present Jesus’ death and resurrection as a great victory over sin and over death, the overcoming of all the forces which had previously held back human beings.  This is the triumph of goodness over evil, the victory of love over hatred, the inauguration of a new form of life which overcomes normal human limitations. The resurrection is far more than just the resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus is now someone who has gone through death himself, conquered it, and come out the other side as something greater, never to die again. This risen Christ blazes a trail for a whole new kind of humanity, the start of God’s new creation, the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God. Like the first spring flower to break the surface of the cold winter soil, he reveals what can one day happen to countless others.

Multiple insights into the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection

The crucifixion and resurrection are an extraordinary series of events which need to be encountered first of all as a dramatic narrative rather than a tidy theory. If you’d like to experience this in more depth than through my summary above, try reading one of the four Gospels. The Gospels primarily show Jesus through his actions and words, rather than giving long theoretical speculations about him. But Christians quickly came to regard these tumultuous events as God’s dramatic response to the problem of the sin which keeps us at a distance from him. They saw them as God’s answer to the addiction to evil which keeps us from reaching our true potential. Various different descriptions in the New Testament and in later Christian theology attempt to express the different aspects of this truth. The crucifixion and resurrection are, as I’ve described, the great victory of good over evil. They’re an act of reconciliation, the ending of a conflict between people and God. They’re the formation of a new relationship, a new covenant between God and his people. They’re a demonstration of love, which endures violence and overcomes hatred, moving us and changing our hearts. They’re an act of liberation, in which Jesus allows himself to be overpowered by evil so that we might be set free from it. And they’re an act of forgiveness, in which the innocent Jesus takes the place of guilty humanity to receive the punishment of crucifixion, while we are acquitted. All these partial images express the idea that Jesus made a great sacrifice in order to make possible a new future for human beings

There’s a lot to be said about all of those images, and I could talk at length about any of them if I had time. They all have advantages and limitations. They’re all, in different ways, important. They’re all part of the richness and complexity of the way in which God has revealed himself to us and acted to save us. It always troubles me, therefore, when Christians grab hold of one insight into the meaning of the crucifixion and try to repackage it as a perfect and complete definition of the true essence of Christianity.

You may well hear, for example, some Christians explaining the Gospel entirely in terms of a theory called penal substitution. This is the claim that God the Father is compelled by his own just and holy nature to punish all evil. But because God is also loving, the theory says, he chooses to punish Jesus for our sins. And this thereby enables him to forgive all those who have faith in Jesus. And that’s a widely-used way of explaining the Gospel. It’s main advantage is its simplicity, but it does have some major limitations.

You can certainly find some of the building blocks of penal substitution in the Bible, but it’s never explicitly stated in those terms. So it’s not actually as biblical as many people think it is. And it’s a way of interpreting the Bible which didn’t really catch on until the sixteenth century. Penal substitution was a very powerful idea at that time, because many people then did tend to believe that any just ruler should seek to punish every evil deed. But there’s nothing in the Bible which says that God cannot forgive a sin without transferring its punishment to someone else. And, indeed, there are plenty of biblical examples of God just simply forgiving people. And it’s an idea which seems quite strange to most people today. It’s commendably simple, but it runs the risk of making God the Father sound like a rather vindictive bureaucrat. It loses the strong biblical sense that crucifixion is an act carried out by human beings and by the powers of evil in the world, not by God. It makes the resurrection seem like a bit of an afterthought, and doesn’t allow a prominent place for much of Jesus’ life and teaching. And it can make salvation seem like a kind of legal transaction which occurs within the Trinity, in which God deals with his own internal contradiction between his love and his justice.

If people find penal substitution helpful, it can be a useful introduction to Christianity. But I always feel sad when people are made to think that being a Christian is all about believing this one somewhat eccentric theory about the cross. There really is a lot more than that going on in the Bible.

On the whole, the Bible presents the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as a victory over sin and death. An event which brings reconciliation between people and God. That’s how it was primarily understood in the early Church. And that’s what makes the most sense to me.

I think of Jesus’ victory as being a decisive undermining of evil from within, cutting it off at its roots. Jesus made himself vulnerable, shared in our human nature, and suffered the full onslaught of the evil of the world, the darkness of human hatred. Evil usually breeds more evil, so that acts of cruelty lead to hatred, retribution and further violence. But Jesus confronted evil and refused to be transformed by it. His love was stronger than the murderous chaos which assaulted him. It was a surprising, decisive humiliation of the powers of darkness, whose customary hold over the human heart was unexpectedly shattered. They were unable to make him become like them. It is an event which still astonishes people, moves them to tears, and brings people back to God. And so Jesus described his death as something glorious, in which he would be lifted up on the cross in order to draw all people to himself.[4] Countless people have experienced the wonder of the cross as something which brings them close to God. And the resurrection completes Jesus’ triumph, overcoming death and restoring him to his rightful place of honour, showing that the benefits of his victory are open to all.

Conclusion

Jesus’ victory is a decisive undermining of evil from within, but the world remains for now a tangled mixture of good and evil. A way to God has been opened up for people, and it’s possible to share in the benefits of Jesus victory over sin and death. But this still requires a response from us, and a journey of patient discipleship. Next week, I shall talk about how Christians understand the various ways in which we encounter God today. And how we may be transformed and made more like Jesus Christ.

And this transformation of individuals is linked with God’s aim for the whole world, the full coming of the Kingdom of God, the transformation of the earth and the resurrection of the dead. That will be the subject of my fourth talk.

But today’s question was: ‘What is God like, and how could we ever know?’ And my answer is that Jesus Christ shows us in human form what God is like. That Jesus Christ came to bridge the gap between God and people, to overcome sin and death, and to make it possible for us to relate to God in a personal way. That, of course, leaves open a great many questions. And I’d be delighted to have a go at answering any that you have.

This talk was given in Downing College Chapel on 30 January 2012 as part of the Theology for Beginners series

 Click here if you would like to listen to a recording of the talk.

Introduction

What is Theology? Well, as you’d expect, I’d like to begin this talk with a quote from Richard Dawkins.

What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false… The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all? - http://richarddawkins.net/articles/88

Now, I’m going to make a case in this talk for saying that Richard Dawkins has missed the point. To me he seems rather like a very short-sighted child in a cinema who’s become so fascinated by the mechanisms of his folding seat that he doesn’t realise there’s a film on. He knows a lot about some interesting things. But there’s something about the big picture of the nature of reality which he just doesn’t get.

One thing he never acknowledges is the great debt which western scholarship as a whole owes to theology. Universities like Cambridge and Oxford were set up by Christian scholars –  monks and priests who had a passion for learning the truth about God and about all God’s works. In the early centuries of this university, theology was regarded as the queen of sciences. The pinnacle of knowledge. The subject which put everything else in context. And from that flowed an interest in all other areas of knowledge. Such as the natural sciences – the study of God’s creation. An interest in law – the search for ways of regulating human society based on a belief in divine justice and goodness. A love of philosophy, and of the careful study of ideas and texts. A quest to seek the truth which flowed from worship, curiosity and a sense of wonder at God’s universe.

Many of Dawkins’ own ideals about truth and rationality flow from this western, Christian, theological, scholarly tradition. Much of the history of science is closely associated with the history of Christian thought. Pioneering scientists like Newton and Kepler began searching for ordered structures in the universe because they believed in God. Because they thought that a divine creator would shape his creation in a rational, ordered way. Christian faith has inspired much of our greatest art, music, architecture, poetry, drama and literature; and it’s provided the context for much of our scholarship.

It seems to me that all of our areas of knowledge: science, philosophy, law, music, literature, history, aesthetics and so on… they all connect somehow with theology. And theology tries to see the biggest picture of them all. That’s what I shall try to explain during this talk.

The specialisation and fragmentation of knowledge

But there’s a good reason why Dawkins can find more than enough to keep him happily occupied in his scientific corner of this great landscape of knowledge. And that’s the amazing success of the human enterprise of scholarship. There’s been an explosion of knowledge over the last few centuries.

The growth of learning is a wonderful, amazing, exciting development. But one of its consequences is that we have become experts in smaller and smaller areas of specialist knowledge. Here in Downing, we have academics from many different departments. And so it’s actually very difficult for the fellows to talk to each other in any depth about our different areas of research and study. How can the historian who knows all about ninth century political thought compare notes with the expert on industrial lasers? Like most people, we end up discussing television, politics, sport, and the weather. As students, you will find that the further you get from the years when you were all studying similar subjects at school, the harder it is to make sense of each other’s work. Meanwhile, our University Library, which now contains seven million books, has to have a huge extension every few years just find room for all the new publications.

There’s a cost to all this diversification and specialisation, which is that it has been a long time since any of our greatest minds could gain a good understanding of all that is known within their society. People used to admire the ideal of the ‘Renaissance man’: someone who was proficient in all areas of human knowledge and skill. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, born in 1452, had an extraordinary range of achievements. Among these, he painted the Mona Lisa, came up with a design for a helicopter, and made detailed anatomical drawings of the human heart. But we have for a long time assumed a clear division between arts and sciences, and might now be suspicious of an aeronautical engineer who spent too many of his working hours painting portraits.

The place of theology

And, we get so busy in our little areas of expertise, that most people stop trying to see the big picture of how it all fits together. But that’s the traditional place of theology. Theology says that the whole of reality is shaped by one divine intelligence. And so everything finds its true context and meaning in relation to God.

And so theology tries to answer the biggest questions. Like: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the meaning of life? What is consciousness, and goodness, and beauty? What is the significance of love? How should we live? What is it that matters most in life?

And theology answers these fascinating questions in terms of the reality of God. The belief that there is a divine purpose behind the universe. The belief that there is a living, active, conscious mind which structures reality and holds the cosmos in existence. The belief in a creator who is the source of the scientific structures of matter. A glorious, wondrous power who is the origin of all the beauty of the universe. A loving intelligence which seeks to bring forth conscious life, and to enable the growth of love.

But theology can have a tough time these days justifying its existence. Downing hadn’t had its own theology fellow for quite a few years until I became one. And many people here and elsewhere would agree with Dawkins that theology isn’t really a proper subject.

I couple of years ago, I gave that Dawkins quote to applicants for the theology tripos. I asked them at their interviews why they wanted to study something that allegedly wasn’t a real subject. And their usual first response was to point out that most of the people in the world are in some way religious. And that people’s beliefs are worthy of study, even when they’re wrong. If we’re going to admit that history, and geography and anthropology are subjects; if we’re going to say that human cultures and values are worthy of study, then religion has to be worth studying. Whether that’s in a sympathetic or a sceptical way.

But with that approach, there’s a great pressure to turn theology into another collection of specialist areas of expertise alongside all the others. So we have experts on the history of the English Church in the 16^th century. Or experts on one particular book of the Bible. Or experts on Hebrew poetry. Or experts on the sociology of religion. These are all fascinating things, and I’m glad that people are investigating them. But what interests me most is theology as a whole. Not as just one set of areas of expertise alongside all the others. But as something whose traditional role is to look at a bigger picture. And to start to see what all the other pieces of the puzzle mean alongside each other. That would be the beginning of my response to Dawkins.

But this view of faith as a way of seeing everything is something that atheists often find hard to understand about religious people. I’ve noticed this when people have arguments about whether or not God exists. Arguing about whether or not God is exists is very different from arguing about, say, whether or not Birmingham exists. If we’re arguing about the city of Birmingham, we can reasonably assume that we all agree roughly on what a city is. Big place, large population, lots of buildings, offices, shops, houses, transport connections and so on. And we can all agree on what would constitute reasonable evidence for the existence of Birmingham. Photographs. Maps. Satellite images. Train timetables. And so on. The point is that we’re arguing within the same framework, within the same shared set of ideas. And Birmingham either exists within that framework, or it doesn’t.

But when we’re talking about whether or not God exists, we’re not arguing within the same framework. We’re arguing about what the framework is. We’re arguing about a way of understanding everything. We’re not talking about a finite entity which may or may not exist within the universe. We’re looking above and beyond all those areas of expertise, and we’re talking about one who holds the whole of reality in existence.

Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins have both compared a belief in God to a belief in a teapot orbiting somewhere between Earth and Mars. And part of what they were saying is that belief in God is a strange idea which we really ought to be able to prove. In the same way that we could go and find Birmingham. Or an orbiting teapot.

But God is not a finite thing flying around within an otherwise godless cosmos. God, if he’s there, is the source of all reality. In him we live and move and have our being, as it says in the Bible. God, say the theologians, is greater than the universe. And the cosmos, in a sense, exists within God.

So God isn’t a thing within the cosmos which can be scanned, or weighed or measure, or put in a mass spectrometer. God is the one who holds everything together and makes all the laws of physics work.

Theology and science

And that’s why I believe that there really isn’t any conflict at all between good science and good theology. Because they operate at different levels. And, in doing so, they fit together very well, and belong together.

Theology says that the universe has a purpose. That it’s structured by an eternal divine intelligence. That its physical processes therefore operate in unchanging, consistent, logical ways. That it’s a harmonious realm, ordered by a single creative intellect. And so it’s not a shifting, unintelligible chaos. And it’s not the work of competing supernatural forces. But there’s unity, order, structure, logic and consistency, because it is the product of one intelligence. Underneath the complex phenomena of the universe, with its trees and stars, ants and mountains, storms and harvests, there’s one mind, one rational power, one consistent and faithful way of working. That’s why it’s packed full of regular, consistent patterns which scientists can discover.

And that’s why we, as rational creatures, can function within this ordered universe and start to make sense of it. Theology gives a reason to believe in our rationality and in a cosmos of rational patterns. Our intelligence can explore the works of God, because those works are the products of his intelligence. And we can learn about the universe because it behaves in consistent ways, full of repeating patterns, because it is governed by this one supreme power. Therefore, a belief in one divine creative mind provides a framework in which the rational, scientific study of nature makes sense. And so those who study the history of science know that science has flourished greatly within the western, Christian scholarly tradition which has formed the history of universities such as Cambridge.

So theology isn’t in conflict with science. Instead, it offers a way of looking at reality within which science makes sense. And every time that scientists uncover another consistent, mathematical pattern in the universe, they’re finding exactly the kind of thing that a theologian would expect them to find.

But there have been some heated arguments over the last two centuries between some scientists and some religious people. And a lot of myths have been made up to suggest that there’s an inevitable conflict. Most historians and philosophers of science would now deny that there is any fundamental conflict at all, and I’ll happily answer any questions later you have about specific examples.

Creation and evolution

But probably the most important one to mention is the myth that a belief in evolution is inconsistent with a belief in creation. It seems to me that this is utter nonsense. But sadly the myth is growing. And there’s a particular kind of protestant fundamentalism, usually deriving from America, which is fiercely opposed to evolution. And, of course, Richard Dawkins and others enjoy rightly pointing out how silly it is.

In fact, good theologians have mostly been very happy to understand evolution as the mechanism by which God caused life to develop. They believe that scientists have uncovered some more of the details of how God’s creation works. Darwin himself did not think that evolution implied a godless universe. And the majority of Christians belong to churches whose clergy and scholars believe that evolution shows the mechanism whereby God caused the creation and development of life. The evidence for evolution is extremely strong, found within ancient fossils, within the patterns of DNA, and in the distribution of different species in different places around the world. For me and for a great many other theologians, evolution seems to fill in some of the details of our picture of the works of God, rather than to overturn the picture. It makes the picture even more wondrous.

I used to work in a church which was built in 1170, a beautiful Romanesque building whose elegant design and fabulously-carved stonework told a story of over 800 years of human life, community, art, faith and spirituality. But an even older story was hidden within the fabric of the stone walls. Little fragments of shells could be seen here and there, trapped within the solid rock. They told a story of an ancient sandy sea bed millions of years ago in the Jurassic era, when dinosaurs walked the earth, and when the English countryside was submerged in warm water somewhere near the tropics. This planet is ancient, as we are part of its long story. But an even older story was hidden within the fabric of those shells. They were made from atoms which, like the atoms making up our bodies, were forged in the heart of stars billions of years ago. And they were then flung across the universe in colossal explosions. But they came to form a planet which was just right for living creatures. I used to think about those three long stories when I sat in the still, prayerful atmosphere of that church. It seems to me that the long story of the development of the cosmos and of life on earth is a wondrous thing. It’s a marvellous account of the purposes of God which stretch across the vastness of space and time. It captivates my mind, and it draws my heart to worship.

Some will object that this story sounds far too random to have any sense of purpose behind it. But scientists have found more and more ways in which our universe seems to be perfectly configured to cause the evolution of life. It’s a very special place indeed.

There are many details about the laws of physics, the structures of atoms and the conditions of the big bang which seem to be precisely balanced to give rise to a universe within which life can evolve. Cosmologists have simulated the results of tweaking any of the universe’s parameters, working out how it would have developed under very slightly different conditions. And the results have been startling. You only have to change the strength of gravity by a tiny amount, or give the merest nudge to the balance of forces within atoms, or give an infinitesimal alteration to the way in which the universe first expanded and then life becomes impossible. The tiniest adjustment can mean that the universe collapses back in on itself long before any planets have appeared, or flies apart too fast for galaxies to form. Or it could have the result that the carbon atoms which are the basis of life are not stable, or that there is no water. In fact, many physical different parameters have to be fine-tuned to within one per cent of their current setting for the universe to be an environment within which life can evolve. And the probability of them all being just right is absurdly small. The universe is just right for life.

And the process of evolution seems to be one which gradually draws out the potential which is inherent in the universe. Take for example the evolution of the eye. The eye seems to have evolved independently in different kinds of living creatures many different times. It has a lot in common with the cameras that we have invented: a lens projects an image onto a sensor. This seems to be the simplest way of receiving and processing light in a way which shows us the detailed layout of our surroundings. So here’s the really remarkable thing: given the structure of reality, given the laws of physics, given the way that light behaves and interacts with matter, given this potential inherent within the cosmos, the eye is the solution which arises repeatedly to make use of that potential. It’s happened independently a number of times on Earth, because separate evolutionary processes have converged on the same solution. So, if there’s life on other planets, we can reasonably expect aliens to have eyes. It’s likely, also, that they will have two eyes so that they can judge depth and thereby perceive three dimensions of space. So the existence and structure of eyes is determined by the structure and functioning of the universe. Evolution involves a large number of random mutations and a very long time, but the end result is shaped by the design of the cosmos itself. The eye, amazingly, follows directly from the very parameters of physics which were built into the Big Bang.

This view of evolution is different from the picture of a creator who designs eyes and then calls them into existence in a day. But, I think it’s an awe-inspiring discovery to find that this universe is precisely structured to enable the evolution of life, and is also structured in a way which leads to the evolution of eyes. The same could be said about our other senses and faculties. Our physical bodies are, in a sense, a reflection of the shape of reality. So too is our intelligence and our consciousness. Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology in Cambridge, has therefore written about evolutionary convergence and ‘inevitable humans’.

So there’s no conflict between a belief in creation and a belief in evolution. The theological idea of creation concerns the purpose and meaning of the universe. And evolution is a description of the mechanism of creation. Creation is a statement of why life exists, and evolution is an account of how it developed.

Genesis 1 and evolution

But you may want to ask about the beginning of the Book of Genesis. How can I, as a Christian, believe in a very long process of evolution? Genesis talks about living creatures being made in six days? However, this question can easily be answered by anyone who’s actually read Genesis carefully. It contains not one but two accounts of creation, which themselves give contradictory details of the order of creation. It would appear that the two texts come from different original sources: there are differences in style, such as the fact that God is simply called ‘God’ throughout the first account and the ‘Lord God’ throughout the second.

Chapter one describes the famous sequence of six days of creation. Within this, the heavens and the earth are created on the first day, the plants on the third day, birds and fish on the fifth day, and animals and people (both men and women) on the sixth day. But in the second account in chapter two, a single man, Adam, is created first, on the day of the creation of the earth and the heavens. His creation is followed by that of the plants, and then the animals. Finally, when the lonely Adam has finished naming every single living creature and assessing them as potential helpers (which must have taken a few weeks), Eve is created as his wife. So the order and timescales are completely different in the two accounts, which suggests to me that the order and timescales are not the real point.

If you attempt to interpret both chapters literally, they don’t fit together at all. And yet, they provide a set of powerful, moving and meaningful images to illustrate the purpose of the universe. They show clearly a sense that creation is ordered, meaningful and good, and that human beings have a special place in the purposes of God. They show that the universe depends on God for its existence. But whoever combined them made no attempt to harmonise their details, and so doesn’t seem to have thought that the detailed mechanisms of creation were the real point of the texts. It seems clear to me that the real meaning and purpose of the combined document is not as an exact scientific history of how things began.

If you’re determined to see chapter one as a literal scientific account, then you have to go through all kinds of clever manoeuvres of reinterpretation to make the second chapter fit in, or just largely ignore it. That suggests to me that the combined text simply does not work that way. And I’m not saying that because I know about evolution and am looking for excuses to change my view of Genesis. Theologians in the early church were happy to interpret these biblical passages as symbol and allegory. They asked how there could be days and daylight three days before the creation of the sun in chapter one. They wondered if a day might represent a much longer period of time. And, reading chapter three, they said that God would not literally walk around in the Garden of Eden having to search for Adam and Eve. Most Jews and Christians have been content to regard these two stories as having a poetic, symbolic meaning.

The Genesis accounts show the purpose behind creation – answering why the cosmos was made, rather than giving an exact description of the mechanisms of how it was made. And Genesis is written within the limited scientific understanding of the ancient world. It made sense even to an audience who knew very little about cosmology. It’s not meant, in a few short pages, to be the last word about the complex workings of the universe and to rival all the subsequent discoveries of scientists. On the contrary, it shows a sense that the cosmos has a goodness and an order which comes from God, and which should therefore be worth investigating. The fact that this investigation has uncovered huge amounts of evidence for evolution seems to me to be something which adds to the picture given by the creation accounts in Genesis, rather than replaces it.

How theology puts all subjects in the right context

So, I’ve made the bold claim that theology belongs at the top level of knowledge: it’s the framework which shows how all those specialist areas of expertise fit together. I’ve advanced the case that theology and science fit together very happily, with theology providing the context for science. And I’ve spent a while on that, because a lot of people assume that it isn’t true. But the really big claim I’m going to make is that this works for all subjects. Theology shows its power and its validity by being able to show the context and significance all other areas of human knowledge.

Let me begin, therefore, with the central idea of theology. The theory is that there is a loving, intelligent power which has created the universe and holds it in existence, sustaining all its physical processes. And that this God has configured the cosmos so that it brings forth conscious, intelligent life. That this one rational mind which underlies the whole of reality has provided an environment in which other rational, conscious beings can arise. And the reason for creation is that God is loving.  God wants there to be other beings who can experience love, and who have the opportunity to develop relationships of love with him and with each other. But no one can be forced to love. And so, within this divine purpose, there’s a genuine degree of freedom for us. We’re able to grow as authentic, individual people. And to make real choices. To choose to join in with God’s creative purposes, or not to. To choose to be loving and courageous, or selfish and fearful. But God seeks to inspire us to grow in love and in virtue, and to take delight in knowing and loving him and each other. Christianity, like other faiths, has a dramatic story of how God has made that possible – and I’ll say more about that next week.

That’s the central, big idea of theology. A loving creator who seeks to bring forth consciousness and love. So how does it connect with everything else?

Well, this theological theory implies that the drama of the development of human personality and civilisation is immensely significant. The ways we grow through the day to day struggles of life, and all the dilemmas we face, are very important. We know that instinctively. Which is why we love to explore those themes in the stories we tell, whether real or fictional. We love detailed narratives about adventures, conflicts and moral dilemmas. We’re fascinated by accounts of how people’s characters are formed. So a theological view of life explains the significance of our love of novels, plays, literature and history. These aren’t some whimsical set of hobbies. They’re closely connected with the purpose behind the universe. People who are studying English or History, or the literature and culture of other countries, or human geography, or sociology, or anthropology, are all exploring aspects of the drama of human life, personality and civilisation. They’re finding out about how people live and grow within the environment which God has provided for us. From a theological perspective, any study of the challenges of being human and of living with other humans is very important. Whether that’s analysing the great themes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or studying the causes of the Second World War, we’re engaging in a serious enquiry about something which is connected to the purpose of the universe.

And if you’re studying ethics or law, then you’re looking in detail at the theme of right and wrong. From a theological perspective, goodness is real – just as real as atoms or forces. Because, in all our choices, there is a constructive, loving direction in which God seeks to inspire us to go. There are good choices which will lead people and societies to flourish, in harmony with God’s intentions for us. And there are bad choices which lead to emptiness and meaninglessness. Good and evil have a clear theological basis.

So has beauty. The beauty we find in music, in nature, in art, in each other. There’s a potential for delight, wonder and attraction which God has placed in the universe. Because God is glorious and wonderful, and his beauty is glimpsed through the beauty of creation. It’s something which inspires people to seek him and to marvel at him. We delight in the beauty of art and music, and are drawn towards each other. And we may see something of the glory of God in the beauty of the world. There’s a potential for relationship and joy in God’s universe, which again has a clear theological basis. So anyone who is studying music, or the history of art, or aesthetics is studying  a potential for beauty which God has placed within his creation. There is a theological reason for the importance of beauty.

And the existence of human consciousness, whose nature is still very mysterious, again has a clear theological purpose. God is conscious, and seeks to bring forth other conscious life. So our sense of self, our ability to reflect on ourselves, our ability to be aware of our existence, our ability to ask questions about it, our spirituality, our inner life… all these have an importance which is clearly recognised in a theological view of reality.

Theology as a theory of everything

So, in my view, what makes theology so compelling is not that I have some evidence for God existing as an entity within the universe. God isn’t like Birmingham or an orbiting teapot. What makes theology so compelling is that a belief in God is the most powerful theory for making sense of everything. From the electrical properties which make my computer work, to the joy and wonder I feel when I look at the beauty of the stars, and to the relationships I have with those I love. It provides a way of celebrating and nurturing a whole range of interests which seem vitally important. It provides a deep understanding of what enables human beings to flourish.

When I was a natural scientist, I was fascinated by the quest for a grand unified theory of everything. A single set of equations which would account for all the physical phenomena of the universe. At the moment, the theories of Newton, Maxwell and Einstein do part of the job, and quantum mechanics does another part of it, and then there are various bits we still don’t understand. But no one has yet found a way of making the equations we’ve got all fit together in one theory. Perhaps that will happen one day. But I actually do believe that theology already provides an even more powerful theory of everything at a higher level. Theology provides a perspective which shows the meaning of the scientific patterns of the cosmos. And it also shows the significance of goodness and beauty, the importance of consciousness and the drama of the development of human character and civilisation.

Which is why I think theology gives a bigger picture than someone like Dawkins is able to see. It’s why he seems to me like a very short-sighted child in a cinema who’s become so fascinated by the mechanisms of his folding seat that he doesn’t realise there’s a film on. Theology can easily affirm all the good things that Dawkins affirms, as well as seeing things that he misses.

Theology contrasted with reductionism

So theology, as I’ve presented it, is a constructive endeavour, which seems to look upwards and outwards and to see the biggest possible picture. And I’ve been contrasting it with our usual habit of developing smaller and smaller areas of expertise. Now, alongside that specialisation goes another way of thinking which deserves a mention. It’s called reductionism. It appeals especially to scientists, but you can find it in some form in most subjects. And it’s probably the main competitor to the theological big picture I’ve just described as a way of making sense of everything. Reductionism is the practice of taking things to pieces, trying to understand everything in terms of something smaller and simpler.

Suppose we start with the phenomenon of human consciousness and run it through the processes of reductionism a few times. I’ve already mentioned a theological view of the significance of consciousness within God’s creative purposes for the cosmos. But a series of reductionists would analyse it in a very different way.

First we meet the neuroscientists who try to understand human consciousness in terms of the properties of the brain. And then the biochemists who try to understand the living cells that make up the brain in terms of the chemical properties of the molecules that they are made of. And then the chemists who look at the chemical bonds that hold atoms together in molecules, trying to understand them in terms of the laws of physics. And then the physicists who study atoms, trying to understand them in terms of sub-atomic particles like electrons and quarks. In each case, people who are trying to understand the universe at one level try to explain it in terms of the next level down – in terms of things that are smaller and simpler.

And that is a fascinating, worthwhile and very useful endeavour. It’s what you need to do if you want to understand the mechanisms of nature. And to reshape them. To make machines and medicines and fertilisers and bridges. And the achievements of science, medicine and engineering are remarkable. But this quest to understand everything in terms of smaller things inevitably never finds any meaning or purpose in the world. Because it’s asking a different set of questions and looking away from the questions of meaning and purpose. You don’t find mountains by looking under tables.

But this is where the atheist fundamentalism of Dawkins gets most disappointing. He will talk about how science can explain everything and how science is therefore all we need. But explaining things in terms of smaller things is a rather limited project. And the assumption that science is the only truth is not actually part of science itself. A commitment to scientific reductionism on its own isn’t actually part of science itself. It’s an ideology which Dawkins and others have tacked onto it. Science on its own just says that there are regular, mathematical patterns in the physical workings of the cosmos. By its very nature, it doesn’t itself rule out any transcendent realms of meaning and purpose. By its very nature, it isn’t looking for them.

So the scientific, reductionist quest on its own doesn’t lead to any ultimate answers. In my experience, physicists are often more sympathetic towards religion than biologists are, since physicists are the ones who have followed reductionism down to its most fundamental level and are very well aware that it doesn’t lead any further. They get down to subatomic particles and forces, and then there’s nothing smaller and simpler they can get to. And they are simply left facing the mystery of existence itself and wondering what it means.

It seems to me that each of these levels of reductionism is fascinating and important. But there’s a lot to be said for also trying to explore things in the opposite direction: believing that each level exists to make possible the one above it. Atoms exist to enable cells. Cells exist to enable brains. Brains exist to enable consciousness. I think that human consciousness happens because of all those levels below it, from quarks to brain cells. But I also think that it far transcends them. Consciousness is much greater than the sum of all its ingredients.

And that’s why our universities don’t just consist of scientists, and they shouldn’t do. It’s meaningful also to study literature, music, art, politics and history. The arts and humanities subjects explore human experience, which cannot be reduced to a set of equations describing the properties of atoms. Culture, literature, love and civilisation exist because of atoms and forces, but I’m not waiting with any realistic expectation for all these forms of knowledge to be reduced to equations and derived from the laws of physics. There’s much about who we are, as individual people and as people in communities, which transcends anything which could ever be explained mathematically. You can’t deduce the fact that I like singing, astronomy and eating raspberries from the wave equation of a hydrogen atom.

Talking about the limits of reductionism, I can draw another analogy by comparing the cosmos to a piece of music. If I carried out a scientific analysis of a symphony, I would find that it was full of mathematical patterns. Musical harmonies arise when notes are played whose frequencies are related. If one note has a frequency which is double that of another, for example, we hear an octave. A ratio of 3 to 2 produces a perfect fifth (like C and G). And a ratio of 5 to 4 gives a major third, (like C and E). All those notes together make a major chord, a very pleasing and harmonious set of sounds. Rhythm also is mathematical: four semi-quavers make a crotchet, for example. And tunes usually fall into phrases of equal lengths, such as repeated sets of eight bars. Many books could be written about the mathematical patterns of just one symphony. And, having discovered them, I could adjust them. I could change the sound of the music, and gain power over it. But I wouldn’t have understood the music if I thought that the mathematical patterns were the real point. I wouldn’t have understood the music, however intricately I knew its structures, if I thought that the structures were what it was all about. I wouldn’t have understood the music until I experienced it as music, and until I felt the emotions that the composer wanted me to feel. In and through the intricate mathematical structures of the music can come a form of communication which may engage and delight my soul. The symphony can speak from one heart to another. It’s a message, something which is meant to build a relationship between people. And you can’t reduce the truth of the symphony, or its meaning and purpose, to its many mathematical patterns, even though they make it possible. They find their true context within the non-mathematical realms of consciousness, beauty and relationship.

And similarly, the scientific structures of the cosmos find their true meaning within the creative love of God. The beauty of the universe is an attempt to communicate with us. And the structures of the cosmos are there to make possible a setting within which a relationship of love can grow. The fundamental truth about the universe is not the existence of sub-atomic particles, interesting and important though they are. The most important truth about the universe is the love of God, which gives it its purpose.

And I believe that science, like human identity, goodness, beauty and love all make the most sense when understood in relation to theology. Dawkins has missed the big picture.

Theology, openness and the growth of knowledge

I’m coming to the end soon. But I have some final thoughts on the nature of theology. Earlier, I said that there was a western, Christian academic tradition in which theology was seen as the Queen of Sciences. The most important subject, which put all others in their right perspective. And I claimed that we have all inherited great benefits from that tradition. Now, I have been saying that we can still understand theology in that kind of way. So does that mean that I am trying to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages?

Actually, no. Obviously, there’s much that I’m agreeing with about that medieval view of the place of theology. But I think that there was often a lack of openness about medieval theology. A kind of fearfulness and eventually a lack of vision. It was too well connected with a very static, aristocratic political system, in which Christianity was used to maintain the power of the powerful. At its worst, there were inquisitions, crusades, and a lack of free speech. I don’t like the rigidity and the cruelty of that situation. Medieval scholars like St Thomas Aquinas did an amazing job of bringing together the best theology, philosophy and science they had at the time in one unified view of the cosmos. But the system eventually turned out to be too inflexible and too closed to encompass the enormous explosion of knowledge that came later.

I don’t want to make some kind of bid for power for theologians, and say that we should be in charge of everything, and that scientists and historians should bow down before us.

But, I do want to talk about the nature of truth, and I think theologians can serve others in their search for truth. Because I do think there’s a kind of top level of truth which relates to the purpose of the cosmos, the meaning of life, the significance of consciousness, and the reality of God. Inevitably, our understanding of that top level is going to be tenuous and partial. It is the realm of wonder and faith, rather than tidy certainties. Inevitably, there will be multiple perspectives on the complex reality of God. And there’s so much to know and to discover about this amazing universe, that any system of human knowledge needs to be very flexible and very open in order to accommodate new discoveries.

Theologians have a role in bringing together the different little pieces of all our areas of expertise, and pointing towards a bigger picture which provides a meaning to them all. That requires dialogue, rather than aggression. And curiosity rather than arrogance. But my claim is that a belief in God is what makes most sense of the power of the intellectual traditions we have inherited. And it’s what makes most sense of the glorious wonder of the whole of reality.

A look ahead to later talks

In this talk, I’ve spoken about God in ways which I think are true to a Christian faith, but which people of other faiths may well largely agree with. I’ve spoken about God in terms of the ways in which theology can make sense of what we observe and experience. Next week, I shall ask the question of how we might know what God is like in himself. And I shall talk in specifically Christian terms about the significance of Jesus Christ. The week after that, I’ll look in more detail at Christian spirituality and questions about how we may experience the presence of God as individuals and in community. Then I’ll move on to look at ideas about the future which God has in store for us, the purpose of the cosmos and the meaning of life. And questions about heaven, hell and judgement. Then, I’ll look at some of the main tricky questions which Christians have struggled with over 20 centuries, and the reasons for the divisions in the historic denominations and within the churches today. And finally in the last week, I’ll return to the question of the range of beliefs of the religions of the world.