Keeping Alive the Rumor of God. Martin Camroux

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СКАЧАТЬ to operate outside the perspective of the gospel it can only lead to a corrosive moral skepticism. Stephen Shakespeare describes the radical orthodox critique vividly: “There is reason in Christian theology, but it is not the same as the fake reason offered by the secular Enlightenment, which is western prejudice in fancy dress.”60

The problem is traced back to the very roots of modernity. “Once, there was no ‘secular.’”61 The first line of Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory expresses, in condensed form, the major presupposition of radical orthodoxy, i.e., that during the first millennia of Christianity, thought and belief was rooted in a Trinitarian religious vision. Once there was no secular, but a single community of Christendom. Around the fourteenth century, however, this unity began to erode, and a supposedly neutral space of reason and metaphysics gradually began to open. Once secular thought is let loose, we are on the inevitable road to Hitler and Bojack Horseman.

For radical orthodoxy the key is to recognize that the Christian story and it alone, is true. It is only when enlightened by God that you can think clearly. As Philip Blond puts it, “Only theology can, in the fullest sense of the word, see at all.”62 Lines are drawn between those who have the truth (us of course) and those who do not. Milbank says, “Christianity’s universalist claim that incorporation into the Church is indispensable for salvation assumes that other religions and social groupings, however-virtuous seeming, were finally on the path of damnation.”63 Any church which finds that other than repugnant deserves to be regarded as toxic.

At a more popular level modernity has been resisted by various forms of fundamentalism. The rise of Salafist Islam is but the most visible example of an increasing stridency and fundamentalism among the world faiths. Hardline nationalist Hinduism, extremist Buddhism, like the BBS in Sri Lanka, or the growth of ultraorthodox Haredi Judaism, are all evidence of a fundamentalist trend in much of the world’s religion. This trend is not confined to the global south. In the United States a 2014 Gallup poll showed 42 percent of Americans hold creationist views, though the number is dropping.64 In both Britain and America as the mainstream churches have declined fundamentalist churches have shown more resilience and grown in relative importance, contrary to the liberal expectation that increased education would make fundamentalism impossible. I am reminded of a Peanuts cartoon which showed a downbeat Charlie Brown after his baseball team had been beaten 184–0. “I don’t understand it,” Charlie Brown says. “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?!”

Galling as it is to liberals the facts, however, are quite clear. Most Pentecostals are fundamentalists and the New Church Movement is also largely fundamentalist in nature. Together these two churches represent the fastest growing section of the church in Britain. Collectively, those two groups opened 935 British churches between 2005 and 2010.65 Much of this growth is accounted for by immigration from less secularized cultures but it also reflects the ability of conservative religion to better resist the secular mood. Their countercultural nature allows a basis for resistance to the prevailing secularity and, in an insecure time, they offer security and identity. At a time of fast-changing gender and sexual change, for example, they offer security to those who favor traditional gender roles and authority. Rather ironically, while rejecting the ideas and prejudices of the modern world, they have in practice been more attuned to its cultural characteristics in their worship than many liberals. Sometimes too they may have been better at offering hope.

The intellectual and moral cost is considerable. Fundamentalism is predicated on an absolute view of truth which leaves little space for other faiths, or those who think differently. Fundamentalists frequently endorse an irrational and anti-scientific theory of Young Earth Creationism. Serious biblical scholarship is ignored or rejected, homophobia often tolerated or encouraged, and fundamentalism is increasingly linked to extreme politics. In January 2018, India’s higher education minister Satya Pal Singh threatened to remove evolution from school and college curricula. “Nobody, including our ancestors, in written or oral [texts], has said that they ever saw an ape turning into a human being.”66 That an education minister can say this is particularly shocking, if not Orwellian, like the ministry of peace organizing for war.

      At the other extreme, often called progressive, the tactic is often capitulation. Historically liberal theology offered the possibility of combining coherent Christian belief with an open critical cast of mind. The hope (and sometimes the reality) was that faith would end up stronger this way. That possibility seems much more doubtful today. Liberal theology has lost confidence and coherence. One of the major recent theological developments has been the growth of non-objective theism in which talk of God becomes not a reference to a reality but a linguistic device, or a way of talking of the values in which one believes. Don Cupitt, for example, argues that “in recent years the Liberal creed has been falling apart article by article” and argues that liberalism in its essentials is simply another form of traditional theology.

They still stand in the old Platonic tradition and believe both in one-truth-out-there and in moral-standards-out-there. They are almost without exception scientific realists, and also social-historical optimists who believe, like John Robinson, if not quite in a final guaranteed historical triumph of the Good, then at least in a constant Love-out-there at the root of things. And they use a great deal of traditional language.67

For him the only possibilities now are fundamentalism or a post-modern nonrealism in which God is simply a human construct. “Liberalism is being squeezed out, in society, in the church, and in the intellectual world.”68

All this reflects a growing uncertainty in the progressive wing of the church as to whether, in the end, God language is meaningful. Richard Holloway’s deeply moving account of his growing atheism, which led to the position where “I could no longer talk about God,”69 has met with considerable sympathy because it speaks for a good many others. Brian Mountford, vicar of the University Church in Oxford for thirty years, advocates being a “Christian Atheist,” although he is more than a little vague about what this means: “Christian Atheist is a ragged category and I apologize if I can’t be pinned down by definitions.”70 The Quaker David Boulton in his The Trouble with God is honest as to the way his beliefs dissolved: “I have been cutting God down to size, lopping off a hand here, a foot there. Now there was virtually nothing left of him, If I worshipped anything at all, it was a divine Cheshire Cat, sans claws, sans teeth, sans virtually everything. Only the grin was left.”71 The New Zealand theologian Lloyd Geering, in his Christianity without God, argues that not only can Christianity exist without God but today it must. “We have now reached the stage within the evolving stream of Christian tradition when to achieve the most mature state of personhood we must become emancipated from the last element of our cultural tradition which has the capacity to enslave us—namely theism.”72

      Such views find sympathy among a good number to whom the language of God has ceased to speak. The result is that a significant number of progressive Christians are closer to atheism than to theism in any recognizable form. Some are quite explicit about this. On its website the atheist Sunday Assembly affirms:

      We are a godless congregation that celebrates of life.

      •We have an awesome motto: Live Better, Help Often and Wonder More.

      •A super mission: to try to help everyone find and fulfil their full potential.

•An awesome vision: a godless congregation in every town city, or village that wants one.73

      Whatever Schleiermacher had in mind when he sought to articulate a faith for its cultured despisers it was not this.

      Something approximating to a non-theistic faith is more widely held than is sometimes appreciated. When I first cofounded the URC liberal network, Free to Believe, with Donald Hilton in 1996 most of those present were like us evangelical liberals influenced by John Robinson’s Honest to God. Over the years the center of gravity has moved. Jack Spong (whose theism is deeply ambiguous) became the most influential theologian for progressive Christians with a quite considerable following for Don Cupitt. Spong then endorsed Gretta Vosper, a New СКАЧАТЬ