Keeping Alive the Rumor of God. Martin Camroux

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_dcc6dceb-b58a-58fa-a4f4-0d74ef32a325">4. Kelly, Key Findings, 2.

      5. Bullivant, “Europe’s Young Adults,” 6.

      6. Pew Research Centre, “Decline of Christianity Continues,” paras. 1, 10.

      7. Bullivant, Mass Exodus, 28.

      8. Hall, End of Christendom, 38.

      9. Küng, Global Ethic, 152.

      10. Larkin, Collected Poems, 97.

      11. Sunday Times, 2 November 2010.

      12. Spufford, Unapologetic, 1.

      13. Housman, Collected Poems, 43.

      14. Bruce, “Late Secularization,” 22.

      15. Taylor, Altar in the World, xiii–iv.

      16. The Week, 6 December 2008.

      17. Eagleton, Culture, 192.

      18. Fashion, 29 December 2017.

      19. Bruce, Secular Beats Spiritual, 179.

      20. Dawkins, God Delusion, 199.

      21. London Review of Books, 19 October 2006, 32–34.

      22. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry.

      23. Novak, Open Church, 362.

      24. Roethke, Collected Poems.

      25. Dickinson, Complete Poems, 110.

      26. Fosdick, Living of These Days, 230.

      27. Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 38.

      28. Hollinger, “Comments,” 6.

      29. Bradley, Grace, Order, Openness, 1.

      30. Dickinson, Complete Poems, 506–7.

      31. Caputo, Truth, 15.

      2

      Life After Christendom

The collapse of Christendom was not a sudden process but has deep historical roots. Its causes are many and complex. One very obviously is that intellectually it became harder to believe. Peter Gomes may be going too far when he says, “Religion for many moderns, has been reduced to a belief in the unbelievable”32 but the basic mood is not in doubt. The fact that church attendance in England began to decline within a generation of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 is no coincidence. Owen Chadwick, reflecting on the effect of Darwin’s theory of evolution, writes:

More educated Englishmen doubted the truth of the Christian religion in 1885 than thirty years before. And in 1885 many persons, whether they doubted or affirmed, blamed “science” for this change of opinion. Some of them talked as though “science” alone was responsible. And among those who blamed science, some fastened upon the name of Charles Darwin as a symbol, or center, or intellectual force, of an entire development of the sciences as they came to bear upon the truth of religion.33

It was not simply science. The rise of critical history made biblical narratives problematic and was reflected in the skepticism of the Tubingen School of biblical scholars led by F. C. Baur, while writers such as Strauss and Renan offered a more credibly human Jesus than the Jesus of Christian dogma. The rise of the social sciences with Weber and Durkheim placed religious origins and beliefs within a new secular explanatory context and a hermeneutic of suspicion grew up, encouraged by those who Paul Ricoeur calls the “masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.”34

      Increasingly a significant part of what had seemed like central Christian beliefs either could no longer be held, or at least, looked less credible. To take a few examples—the Bible is not an infallible source of truth, its science is virtually nonexistent, and its history is often open to question. Life was not created as we know it but developed out of a single cell through an evolutionary process, mental illness is not caused by spirit possession, homosexuality is not a perversion but an orientation, and there is no heaven above the earth or hell beneath it. The fundamentals of belief have moved. Recently I was at Ely Cathedral for evensong and as the congregation declared, “I believe in the resurrection of the body” I could not but wonder if a single person present believed it to be true?

      But it was not simply the credibility of belief. It was also a realization that Christian teaching was often of questionable morality. Take the doctrine of hell for example. Historically one of the church’s most effective evangelical tactics had been to frighten people into faith. One of Isaac Watts’s hymns contains the verse:

      There is a dreadful hell,

      And everlasting pains;

      There sinners must with devils dwell

In darkness, fire and chains.35

This happy verse is found in his Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language, For the Use of Children. It was an immensely popular book. The British Library contains over a hundred editions from the nineteenth century alone, and it has never gone out of print. Dale Allison suggests it may have been the “best-selling children’s book of all time until the Twentieth Century.”36 This tactic ceased to work with the Victorians for whom the very idea of a God who would torture people for eternity began to seem morally repugnant. If this isn’t divinely blessed abuse, what СКАЧАТЬ