Author Archives: Elizaphanian

About Elizaphanian

Rector of West Mersea

Honi soit qui mal y pense

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The story goes that in the 14th Century, the King of England, Edward III was at court and dancing with his first cousin, Joan of Kent. Her garter slipped down to her ankle and there was sniggering amongst the courtiers at her embarrassment. The King then placed the garter around his own leg saying ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – shame be to him who thinks evil of it. In other words, show some humanity and respect, when you laugh in this context you are simply displaying a lack of nobility. Edward III then founded the Order of the Garter in 1348 in order to uphold this ideal of chivalry.

How far we have come from then: a society where human nature was clearly just the same as ours, but where the institutions and leaders of society sought to uphold a more honourable way of life. I have been reflecting on this in the light of the revelations about phone hacking carried out by the News of the World. The revelations first surfaced with regard to celebrities like Sienna Miller. This did not cause great controversy – there was no great outcry at the plight of a ‘celebrity’ – one might say that we enjoyed seeing their garters fall to the floor. Yet the lack of courtesy and kindness revealed there is also the reason why we had journalists contacting Gordon Brown to ask for his reaction to his son’s cystic fibrosis before the doctors had even confirmed that diagnosis to the parents.

Put simply the last few decades of our national life have seen a steady erosion of all the values and virtues that we had previously held up for emulation. When someone tries to stand up for those values – as with a recently notorious potential mother-in-law – they are exposed to vicious ridicule and derided as an archaic prig. Quite obviously those standards were not always maintained in practice but there is all the difference in the world between striving for greatness, recognising the difficulty of making steady progress, and giving up the attempt out of despair or moral laziness. Virtue is its own reward and there is nobility in the attempt, even if it fails.

We have exchanged that culture for one of prurience. Prurience is the delight in seeing somebody’s garter fall to the floor, enjoying the humiliation and embarrassment that follows. Prurience is what leads the tabloids to build people up and then tear them down; to turn a natural and desirable display of human ability and talent into a celebrity freak show.

I wonder when these changes really began to take hold in our national life. Any complex phenomenon like this clearly has many causes but, for want of a better symbol, I think of the Profumo scandal in 1963. Here there were at least some significant national interests at stake and yet we can see the prurient interests of the press emerging in all their smutty boorishness. The deference and respect for a social order – which is all that might protect those whose garters drop – is exploded by a ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’

Criminal behaviour has to be investigated, and that is the fig leaf behind which the press has perpetrated their recent moral barbarities, but the fuel keeping things going has been our own interest in scandal and gossip, our own inability to accept the exercise of authority by anyone who isn’t a moral paragon and saint. As our society used to be a Christian one there was a general and tacit acceptance that ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’. Whilst this did not excuse immoral behaviour it did at least minimise the sense of scandal when something untoward happened, and it gave a realistic edge to the desire to do better. What we have nowadays is a far more idealistic delusion that we are in a position to cast the first stones at the latest celebrities and politicians to find themselves in the stocks of public disgrace.

If we really believe that what the News of the World did – and indeed, what the rest of the journalistic profession has been up to – is seriously morally wrong then we need to examine ourselves rather than simply enjoy the novelty of seeing journalists get a rare come-uppance. We live in the society that we choose for ourselves and it is possible to choose a different way of life. It is possible to choose a society that shuns gossip and scapegoating, to not engage in a conversation geared around ‘did you hear about…?’ and ‘isn’t it shocking…?’ To not purchase the newspapers that profit from human misery, to turn off the television shows that glamourise immorality. To not laugh when someone’s garter drops to the floor but instead to set our hearts on things above.

(Originally written July 2011, but only posted on a now-moribund blog)

Bertrand Russell’s Decalogue

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I quite like these…

1: Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2: Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3: Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

4: When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5: Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6: Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7: Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8: Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9: Be scrupulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

(From here, via Facebook. Relevant to Andrew Brown’s latest too.)

Ruled by bullies and barbarians

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Christmas is approaching. We remember the story of a pregnant woman travelling far from home being turned away from shelter. We give thanks for the miracle of the safe arrival of the Christ-child, and all the wonderful things that have followed from that.

I can’t help but ponder the differences between that story and the one that has recently come to public attention involving Alessandra Pacchieri. Ms Pacchieri was also a pregnant woman travelling far from home – in her case, she came from her home in Italy to Stansted Airport, to attend a training course. She was heavily pregnant, and through an unfortunate sequence of events, fell foul of the local constabulary and social services. Because she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and was not maintaining her medication, she was ‘sectioned’ – meaning that she was detained in a psychiatric hospital. Her baby girl was removed by caesarean section and, after the first few days, she was forbidden to continue breast-feeding and the child was placed in foster-care. Some fifteen months on, her child is now being put up for adoption, and Ms Pacchieri is pursuing her case through the courts – quite simply, she seeks for her child to be returned to her. In this she is being supported by a number of people and institutions who share my horror at what Essex Social Services have done.

Now I am quite certain that a rational case can be developed to demonstrate that the actions of our Social Services were in line with the proper procedures and guidance that they have to follow. At each point someone with proper authority gave their advice or consent for the next step to be taken. It may be the case that there are details of this case that have not been made public, and that would shed a very different light upon what seems to be a frightening injustice. Yet, I also can’t help but believe that such information would itself have to be pretty staggering to do justice to what has happened. To enforce a caesarean section upon a woman without consent, and then to deny further contact between mother and child, and then to put the child up for adoption against the wishes of the wider family – clearly, this mother must be seen by our social services as one of the most evil mothers ever to walk the earth. For what else might justify their actions? If Ms Pacchieri is simply an averagely competent mother, the welfare of her daughter is greatly advanced by being kept with her mother. This basic truism is even enshrined in European Law, which in this case at least manages to coincide with common sense.

I shall be following the details of this case with great interest, and I pray for an outcome which minimises the trauma for the families involved. What I would like to tease out here, however, is the way in which Ms Pacchieri became subject to the choices of bureaucrats. Wittgenstein once remarked to a friend (who went on to become an eminent psychiatrist) that nothing would frighten him more than being misdiagnosed as mentally ill. Surely it is a fate similar to that of Ms Pacchieri that concerned him. After all, once the diagnosis had been made – once the system had taken control of her life – once ‘the Matrix has her’ – all of Ms Pacchieri’s rights were taken away. She was no longer a person, she was simply a unit, moved around and manipulated, operated on and directed by bureaucratic imperatives. Can there be a more fundamental breach of human rights than this?

We have inherited, in our justice system, a good number of checks and balances; things like trial by jury, habeas corpus, rights to do with free speech and free assembly and so on. These have evolved because of a recognition that the centralisation of power will inevitably lead to abuse. It is through a dispersal of power and, especially, an insistence upon bounds to the arbitrary exercise of power, that have enabled this country to enjoy a wealth of freedom through recent centuries. What the Pacchieri case says to me is that this historic settlement has been abandoned.

What, after all, did it mean to be diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’ – which is the diagnosis given about Ms Pacchieri to justify her incarceration. There is no recognised aetiology for schizophrenia; the word is simply an umbrella term used to gather together a bundle of disparate symptoms – and those symptoms themselves essentially boil down to ‘behaviour which makes the wider society uncomfortable’. (For a thorough debunking of ‘schizophrenia’ as a concept – in other words, for the definitive argument as to why the word has no inherent meaning whatsoever – I would heartily recommend Mary Boyle’s ‘Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion’.)

What has happened is that a small group of people, following recognised ‘good practice’ and deploying all the powers available to the state – including those given to the recently developed ‘Courts of Protection’ (oh Kafka, if only you had lived to see this) – decided that Ms Pacchieri didn’t conform to their desired patterns of behaviour. As a consequence Ms Pacchieri has had her life turn into a real-life version of Rosemary’s Baby. She has been deprived of all agency and dignity and still the bureaucrats want to rend mother and child apart.

I feel ashamed to belong to a society that can allow such a thing to happen. We are ruled by barbarians and bullies. Two thousand years ago, a vulnerable young woman found shelter amongst the animals. Grace allowed amazing things to happen in consequence – in a place apart from polite society, apart from the realms of social acceptability. That is where God is – at the margins, with those who are broken, with the mad and maladjusted, the sinners and fools, those whom the system breaks and crucifies. Ms Pacchieri stands amongst them, and I pray that this Christmas time she might gain some small measure of comfort and support from knowing that.

The sharing of joy, not the shouting of jargon

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This morning I gave a talk to members of West Mersea church about the nature of outreach, in preparation for the Diocesan centenary next year. These are my written-up notes, not a pure transcript of what was said.

There is something a little dispiriting when someone in authority tries to ginger up activity on behalf of the Church of England by declaiming that ‘the Church will be dead in a generation!’. Frankly, who cares? My concern with such language is that it is speaking from a place of fear rather than faith, and that, as such, it can never be good news, it can never be gospel. This is precisely what I believe we must avoid.

It calls to mind something which I have been exploring with my house group recently. We have been steadily working our way through Olivier Clement’s ‘The Roots of Christian Mysticism’, and we came across this extremely striking passage, extracted from the Shepherd of Hermas:

Clothe yourself then in joy where God delights to be. Make it your delight. For every joyful person acts well, thinks rightly, and tramples sadness underfoot. The gloomy person on the other hand always acts badly. In the first place such a one does wrong by grieving the Holy Spirit who is given to us as joy. Then … the gloomy person is guilty of impiety in not praying to the Lord … for prayer offered in sadness lacks the strength to ascend to the altar of God . . . Sadness mingled with prayer prevents it from rising, just as vinegar mingled with wine robs it of its flavour . . . Purify your heart then of the sadness that is evil, and you will be living for God. And all those who have stripped themselves of sadness in order to put on joy will likewise be living for God.

Now here, as with the archetypal mad professor handling fuming test tubes with tongs, we need to be very careful, if we are not simply to add greater burdens to our backs. I take the point of this passage to be that when we are in touch with the gospel, that is, when we are in touch with the good news that has given us joy, then we are enabled and strengthened to act rightly. This does not mean that, for example, our sufferings are caused by a lack of faith. It is to insist that if we are to act fully, and act from a basis of faith, then we also need to act from the basis of joy.

Consider the poor ladies recently released from thirty years of captivity in South London. Imagine what they felt in becoming free, the total transformation of their lives, and imagine what sort of language might come close to expressing their emotions. This is how we are to understand someone like St Paul, and, most especially, this is how we are to understand the grounds for his writings. Consider the passage that we had last week from Colossians – the famous passage about Christ, which is very philosophical. What needs to be kept in mind is the context that comes first, when Paul writes about being drawn out of darkness into the Kingdom of the Son. It is this experience which comes first, and all the metaphysics comes later. Unless we are able to retain a connection with the liberating joy which is the fuel for that philosophical reflection then we become ‘resounding gongs, or clashing cymbals’.

People will doubtless be aware that I find Russell Brand quite interesting at the moment. Have a watch of this video, where he is interviewing members of Westboro Baptist Church:

I find this remarkable, but also quite chilling. I wonder how many people see a vaster array of similarities between my church and the Westboro Baptists, rather than the differences. Whilst I don’t see Brand as orthodox, he is much closer to my own centre of spiritual gravity.

What we have here, I believe, is a perfect example of bad evangelism. It is one that emphasises a particular metaphysical framework, and uses particular jargon. If we say to someone outside the Christian conversation ‘Jesus died to save you from your sins’ it invites various responses: What sin? What IS sin? Why would a loving God set things up in this way anyway? In other words, the language is baroque and meaningless. It is because we know that this is how such words are likely to be received that so many hearts sink when evangelism is discussed.

What we need to pay attention to is the pattern of life which gives the language its context, and therefore meaning. It is the pattern of life and only the pattern of life that can make such language intelligible. I worry that much use of such traditional language is simply the echo of a faithful pattern of life that has now passed away. It is only when we are able to act in loving ways to each other that those who see us talk about love so much can begin to understand what we mean by it. If we continue to use such language, but act in hateful ways, then the words fall to the floor, fruitless.

If we are to engage with the world, and share good news, then we need to be rooted in our joys and not in our fears. We need to be on the path of becoming the people that God has created and called us to be. It is when we do this, when we are helping each other pursue our passions, that God can work his way through us, and we do not hinder Him.

I believe that this is part of the emphasis of the new Pope – as with his latest encyclical, but consider this:

“In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid. And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements. The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people. But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?”

The work of evangelism is not a sales pitch. We do not have to distort ourselves in order to appeal to the world. That, in fact, is a blasphemy. We are made in the image of God, and we each have a vocation to reveal a particular facet of that image to the world. If we allow the world to determine what is revealed and what isn’t, then we deface that image.

This applies to worship too. Worship is not oriented around evangelism – which isn’t to say that worship of itself cannot bring someone to faith, obviously it can. No, worship has to be oriented around God alone, else it ceases to be worship and becomes a golden calf, a source of poison for the community. That doesn’t mean that worship never changes, it means that the grounds for the change have to be internal – ‘what will enable this community to worship God more fully?’ – rather than external – ‘what will appeal to the outsider?’

Evangelism understood as a burden is a falsehood. As if the cry is
“what can we do to make ourselves loved again?” Evangelism will arise naturally and spontaneously, as a direct consequence of pursuing our vocations – and finding joy in doing so – or not at all. Isn’t this what we mean by being led by the Spirit? As we consider how and where to reach out to the community, I believe that our joys will help us discern our answers. Let us get to know our joys and we can then build from there.

I believe that the church does have something to offer the wider world, and I do have confidence in the faith. I watched the film Gravity recently, and I believe it is a wonderful picture of much modern life.

246181id1c_Gravity_Teaser_27x40_1Sheet_CG10.indd

A human being, surrounded by the highest and most effective forms of technology available, yet utterly isolated and longing for home. I believe that this describes a great many people in our world, in our community.

What we can offer is a forgiving community, a place where people can be accepted as beings not doings. After all joy is a being not a doing. How can you ‘do’ joy? Joy comes when we experience that peace which the world cannot give, when we are at home in the world, when we are finding our purpose and point. This, in turn, gives rise to engagement in social justice – for how can we stand idly by when the opportunities for others to pursue their vocation are denied or worse? The heart of evangelism is outwardly focussed – on the welfare and service of the other – not inwardly focussed, on what might best serve the welfare of the church. In doing so, the church stands over against the world, especially a world that sees human beings as interchangeable commodities, to be used and abused as economic exigencies dictate.

We need to be about the business of sharing joy, not shouting jargon. If our inherited language retains sense then that will be shown by our lives. We need to be a blessing to the world, as salt and yeast and light, not a drain. We need to act on the assumption that God has gone ahead of us in all of our work and his gracious activity is already bearing fruit. In other words, we need to be able to join in and celebrate with the joys of the world – and it may just be that we discover and affirm our own joys in the process.

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The Diocesan material followed.

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Today is simply a beginning, to help people begin thinking about the process of outreach. There is a lot of more detailed work to be done. Further dates:
Saturday 1st March – study morning (10am!!) to plan the big weekend
Pentecost Sunday – a commissioning and releasing for the work
28th/29th June – the big weekend (to be confirmed)
21st September – gathering in for Harvest

Politics and the transcendent dimension

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I want to make the argument that, not only do religious people have a right to engage in the political process but that, without religious people involved in politics, without the religious dimension being accepted as legitimate, the political process itself breaks down and inevitably corrupts. I want to make that argument by talking about ‘the transcendent’.

So what is ‘the transcendent’? Well, for my purposes here, I want to describe it simply as ‘that to which we are accountable’. In Christian terms, obviously, it is God, but the core understanding is in common across the different religious traditions. In all of them there is a sense that there is a higher authority than any person’s own particular judgement, and that the path of spiritual growth, of personal maturity, lies in learning to conform the individual will to that transcendence.

Where there is no such accountability – where there is no such sense of the transcendent – then there are no external brakes or restraints on the exercise of individual will. The political conversation devolves into a simple struggle for power, and whoever swings the biggest gun wins. This, it seems to me, accurately describes our existing political arrangements. We suffer from being governed by a class that, collectively, does not acknowledge any wider accountability. That is clearly not the case on an individual level – there are many religious people who exercise political authority – rather, it is a point about the cultural assumptions that dominate the political discourse as a whole. To bring this out dramatically, we only need to consider Alastair Campbell’s infamous ‘we don’t do God’ comment. We don’t do God; we don’t do the transcendent.

Why does there need to be such accountability? Surely I am not not arguing that those who accept the transcendent are somehow ‘better’ or ‘more virtuous’ than those who don’t? At an individual level, no. This is a red herring. Any one individual person may be more or less ethical and righteous, capable of acting honourably and without fear or favour. It is perfectly possible for the language of the transcendent to become empty, a way of disguising all sorts of internal horrors. Jesus said of the Pharisees that they were whitewashed tombs – the language of the transcendent was there, but the internal character that such language was supposed to reflect was markedly absent.

What I am wanting to focus on is the nature of the broader culture within which individuals operate. I believe that one sort of culture – one which acknowledges a role for the transcendent – allows for a different sort of political discourse, and a better sort, than one that does not. Take the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. People of good will can disagree on the merits of that particular decision, but was our dialogue helped or hindered by the absence of ‘doing God’? After all, the salient feature of our foreign policy environment since 9/11 is surely that we need to find a way to engage with and overcome those who ‘do God’ in a particularly virulent fashion. Is it possible to work out a way of engaging with Islamist terror without having a conversation about how and why such religious based terrorism is wrong? And can it be done without coming up with some alternative sense of the transcendent to set against that of the terrorists? I don’t believe so. After all, a specific part of the Islamist critique of our society, which they see as corrupt, soft and decadent, is precisely this loss of any sense of the transcendent, any sense that there is a higher authority than our own choices. They see this as a weakness, and they are emboldened by it.

What a sense of the transcendent allows for is the cultivation of a proper humility within our political culture, a sense that ‘we might be very wrong about this’. This is what seems to me to be most lacking. Our political culture seems to run on a tacit acceptance that the political contest is simply about different varieties of bureaucratic managerialism – a ‘we will run the business better than that lot’ sort of argument. So the political debates become ones about marginal efficiency, and the capacity to raise our long term growth rate by half a percentage point. The environment in which we now live – where there are existential questions for our nation to address, including the challenge of Islamist terrorism, the financial bankruptcy of our institutions, the exhaustion of natural resources – these are not challenges that can be met by managerialism!

Why is humility important? Humility is not self-abasement, it is not about being “ever so ‘umble”. It is about having a true recognition of our place in the world, of our own position and capacity – no more and no less. The language links with that of ‘humus’, that is, the earth. Those who are humble are earthed, they are well grounded in reality. In other words, those who are humble have, by definition, a more accurate understanding of the way that the world works. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. They are, therefore, as a direct consequence, better able to make good decisions, decisions that are more likely to have the intended effect. Those who lack humility are those who are misled about their place in the world; they therefore have a distorted understanding of reality; and they therefore make decisions accordingly.

A political culture which lacks a sense of the transcendent, therefore, lacks this capacity for humility. It will inevitably over-reach itself. It will believe that it has a greater capacity for influencing events than is the truth, and this will lead to increasingly dire consequences. For examples of this, simply read our devilish press. The political actors within such a system do what is right in their own eyes, and the nihilist zombies lead the lemmings over the cliff. Yes, lots of mixed metaphors there, but I’m sure you get the gist.

TBLA (11): the nature of heterosexual attraction (ii)

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I wasn’t planning to come back to this so quickly after the last post, but I obviously didn’t make myself clear….

My language of ‘fundamental building block’ and ‘fundamental basis’ was meant to convey that this is where heterosexual attraction *begins*. It was not intended to reduce heterosexual attraction to this.

When St Paul talks about ‘the flesh’ I take him to mean precisely this biological inheritance. It is what we share with the animal kingdom, or, possibly more precisely, it is the nature of our ‘lizard brain’. It is the most primitive part of our personality. It is also what is most stimulated (in the male) by visual cues, which provoke the dopamine hit leading to addictions.

I believe that human desire – that is, the desire of one human being as a human being, not simply as an animal – is irreducibly complex. It begins with the biological for that is the stuff of which we are made, but it grows and develops until – ideally – the whole of a person is involved. This is what I believe the Christian notion of ‘chastity’ properly consists in. Not a simple repression of the biological but an integration of the biological with all the other elements of the personality. It includes all sorts of labyrinthine details of memory association, context and habits, friendliness and charm – all the things that poets have written about for a long time. Here, also, is where I think we don’t need to talk about ‘heterosexual’ either (I only brought in that restriction to try and simplify that first post).

So: sexy babies. That’s where desire begins for a human being. It isn’t where it ends, it isn’t even it’s most glorious flourishing – but I’m getting ahead of myself in my argument there.

TBLA (10): the nature of heterosexual attraction (i)

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motorcyclemen
Image taken from – and this post prompted by – this post at one of my favourite film sites.

I want to sketch out a simple understanding of the nature of heterosexual attraction, in order to explain why I disagree with the line of argument expressed in the picture. It is an understanding which has only developed in me recently, and is still a ‘work in progress’, but the main lines of it seem to me to be very plausible.

The starting idea is this: the fundamental building block for what counts as sexy in a member of the opposite sex is “whatever makes for healthy babies” (and I owe that formulation to Athol Kay, whose writings I recommend). However, what counts as ‘making healthy babies’ is different in men and women.

For men, any particular act of sexual intercourse is ‘cheap’. It requires very little investment of biological “currency”, ie time and resources. For men, therefore, the question of what will make for a healthy baby is first and foremost a question of fertility, and therefore whatever indicates fertility is seen as sexy.

For women, however, the situation is directly opposite. However brief an act of sexual intercourse might be, the consequence, at least potentially, is immensely costly in terms of time and resources. Whilst there is undoubtedly an element of purely physical attraction (ie a purely ‘biological’ assessment of health and fertility) there is also a significant social element. That is, one of the key markers that trigger attraction for a man is ‘social status’, which is a proxy for the ability to command resources – and therefore ensure that any child born has a better chance of being raised to a healthy age.

So having said all that, what is my disagreement with people like MaryAnn? Well, that motorbike image is not comparing like with like. It is comparing an image developed to appeal to the biological instincts of heterosexual men – in other words, an image of a woman emphasising all the cues of healthy fertility – with a pastiche. The picture of the man by the motorcycle is not an image designed to appeal to the biological instincts of heterosexual women. What would such an image look like? Well, how about this:

gb-sean-connery-as-james-bond

In other words, not just that here is a handsome man, but that here is a man with significant social status and dominance.

What the objections to such images seem to me to be based on is a repudiation of the fundamental basis of male heterosexual attraction. Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps male heterosexual attraction is so inherently destructive to the social order that it really does need to be corralled and controlled. In many ways, traditional Christian sexual ethics is about just that.

Yet if we are not to be irredeemably sexist about this, we need to also acknowledge the fundamental basis of female heterosexual attraction, and the possibility that an unrestrained female desire can be just as destructive as the equivalent in the male. In other words, if we are not to be completely prejudiced, we need to ensure that those things which might turn women on are kept as far from them as possible, in just the same way that those things which might turn men on must be kept away from them.

We would end up with, among other things, a ban on images and a rigid segregation of the sexes. Something, perhaps, that looked a lot like Saudi Arabia.

Alternatively, we could just become a lot more relaxed about both sides of the equation, accept that men respond sexually in the way that they do, women respond sexually in the way that they do, and delight in our differences.

“For a blunder, that’s too big” – some brief musings on the death of the Church of England

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The title of this post is one of my (many) favourite Wittgenstein quotations. It comes from his Lecture on Religious Belief, when he is pointing out that religious belief is not the same sort of thing as a scientific belief; that is, it isn’t something that proceeds in steady and cautious steps from evidence to conclusion. Those that think in these terms simply demonstrate their intellectual captivity to post-Enlightenment nostrums about rationality. Their time has passed; that intellectual battle has been lost; they are simply the intellectual equivalent of Japanese soldiers still occupying tiny islands long after the end of the Second World War. So, no more about that.

I most tend to think of Wittgenstein’s aphorism when pondering the huge cultural changes that we have gone through, where we haven’t yet worked out all the implications of what is happening, or whether they are desirable or not. Most especially, it comes to mind when I think about the Church of England, and what God might actually be seeking from us in this time that we have been given.

Consider George Carey’s fearful remarks, the tired old trope that the church is only one generation from extinction. I shouldn’t let it, but such language always irritates me. Jesus said that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, and I for one believe Him. So let us not get too hung up about whether it falls upon our poor mortal shoulders to save the church – or even the Church of England – for there are legions of angels working for God’s will to be accomplished. Let us, instead, work out what God is seeking to do and then try and cooperate with it.

Which is…? Well, ‘for a blunder, that’s too big’. Might it not be the case that, rather than a story about the long, melancholy withdrawing roar of the Sea of Faith – and therefore a sad story of decline and death – what we have in the religious history of England over the last 150 years is, in fact, the direct working out of God’s will? In other words, that the Church of England, as a centralised and established form of Christianity, intimately bound together with the legal and constitutional arrangements of the country, that this glorious old lady has in fact achieved all that God wanted her to achieve (quite possibly the worldwide transmission of the via media approach to the faith) and that, now this task has been accomplished, what God actually wants is for her to enter her rest, and hear those most gracious words ‘well done thou good and faithful servant’?

After all, what is it that is actually ‘dying’? It isn’t the gospel itself; it isn’t Christianity in this country; it isn’t even the local church, which is often in robust good health. No, it is simply the place that a particular form of Christianity held within the national life of England. England has moved away from it, and all of the ways in which being an Anglican were tied in to the old cultural forms are now dying. What is wrong with that?

I want to stick with my deckchairs and lifeboats image, however hackneyed. I believe that we most need to recognise that the good ship of Establishment is sinking, and trying to prevent that from taking place is not simply a wasted effort on our part, it is actually a blasphemous and misguided attempt to thwart God’s will. The decline of the Church of England is not a blunder.

What we are called to do is the same as what all Christians are called to do, every where and at every time – to be faithful, to hold on to Christ alone and to be willing to let go of everything else. The centralised Church of England is sinking – what strikes me now as being worthy of theological interest is the multitude of Anglicanisms that shall follow – a flotilla of lifeboats floating away from the wreckage, seeking a new shore on which to embark on new adventures. Which is, after all, a more exciting and more inspiring prospect.