Keeping Alive the Rumor of God. Martin Camroux

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СКАЧАТЬ who started off their theological journeys on John Robinson’s Honest to God found themselves finally less sure what, if anything, God might mean. So, Adrian Alkar, in his “Radical Church,” concludes:

Is God the cosmic superhero? Is God the embodiment love? Is God defined in the ethical injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount? Is God as a Life force? Is God the Ground of all being? Or is God a human construct, a word which allows thinking of goodness or loving as the overarching ethical principle.74

      At different times in his life he has held different views on this question but now he asks if that matters? “The journey of radical openness, of honest questioning and the shared experiences of love have been all that mattered.” As chair of Free to Believe people send me emails saying things like

      As a “theological instrumentalist” I can participate in churchgoing and worship because the concepts I encounter there have “instrumental” value regardless of their objective truth-status.

      Today I am constantly meeting lay people and ministers who make it clear that an objective God is no longer part of their understanding of faith. It is to the credit of such theology that it is an honest attempt to come to terms with the crisis of faith. The reality is that significant amounts of commonly asserted or popular Christian doctrine such as the infallible Bible or non-evolutionary accounts of creation, or the miracle-working deity, who dictates the course of human life, are not sustainable. The old scenario of heaven and hell is not defensible nor is a great deal of traditional moral teaching or the uniqueness of Christianity as a way into religious truth or the belief that truth comes to us unmediated by culture. Theology is in chaos and attempts to put the genie back in the bottle will not work. God as supernatural being has died and deserves to die. I share many beliefs with those who take the non-theistic option.

It is not, however, for me. It offers no serious solution to the Christian dilemma. Anyone who has ever rubbed two theological thoughts together knows that God is a mystery who can never be adequately expressed by human language. The religious experience is elusive and fragmentary; more an entering into what Henry Vaughan called “a deep, but dazzling darkness” than a simple revelation of the truth.75 But Christianity stands or falls on whether or not there is reality behind such experiences. If the experience is real we are free to jettison images that are now bankrupt and seek for new words, symbols, and myths to express it. But, if it is an illusion, then the religious enterprise is false and dressing up moral values in religious clothing is philosophically misleading and intellectually incoherent. The honest atheism of Richard Dawkins is much more to be respected than using the word God for that which exists only in our minds and language. So the challenge for religious faith remains the essentially liberal one of taking seriously the intellectual challenge of faith while offering a cause big enough to live for and work for.

      32. Gomes, “Introduction,” 2.

      33. Chadwick. Victorian Church, 1.

      34. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 33.

      35. Watts, Divine Songs, song 1.

      36. Allison, Night Comes, 3.

      37. Field, “Counting Religion in Britain,” 1.

      38. Woodhead, No Religion in Britain, 257.

      39. Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 178.

      40. Martin, Religious and the Secular, 116.

      41. Dickinson, Complete Poems, 87.

      42. Larkin, Collected Poems, 171.

      43. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 43.

      44. Gifford, Western Religion, 39.

      45. Davenport-Hines, Letters from Oxford, xiii, 62.

      46. Voas, “Fidelity,” 164.

      47. MacArthur, Setting Up Signs, 10–11.

      48. Bruce, “Late Secularization,” 14.

      49. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 80–81.

      50. Tutu, African Prayer Book, back cover.

      51. Nietzsche, Will to Power, preface.

      52. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 589.

      53. Dawkins, River Out of Eden, 133.

      54. From an interview with Ken Campbell on Reality on the Rocks: Beyond Our Ken, 1995.

      55. Arnold, Poems, 226.

      56. Daily Telegraph, 2 October 2016.

      57. Auden, Selected Poems, 86.

      58. Milbank et al., Radical Orthodoxy.

      59. McGrath, Renewal of Anglicanism, 110.

      60. Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy, 23.

      61. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 1.

      62. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 232.

      63. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 387–88.

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