THE SILENT CENTRE OF OUR SPIRIT

     For last year's words belong to last year's language
     And next year's words await another voice. 

Any analogy has a limited value and therefore needs to be balanced by another, or by several others. There is a long theological tradition, called 'apophatic', which says that we can only talk about God in terms of what he/she/it is not. So from the image of the mountain with multiple approaches this piece switches to an inner exploration, before going on to say more about obstacles. For some of us, Francis Spufford's prose about his contemplative experiences in a quiet unnamed church still resonates and inevitably connects with other discussions about the power of silence or the physical and psychological benefits of meditation. 

Long before mindfulness became mainstream in the UK, John Main (1926-1982), an English Benedictine monk, pioneered the practice of Christian meditation. His work inspired the foundation of the World Community for Christian Meditation. Writing of the 'contemplative life' in Letters from the Heart (1988), in an attempt to dispel the sense that monastic communities are full of 'lifeless people sitting around all day with little or nothing to do', he said this:

But real prayer, coming from the silent centre of our spirit, is the source of the selflessness of love, the source of energy. In that centre, the source of our Being, we encounter God ... To find God is to find love. To find love is to find oneself in harmony with the basic energy of all creation, which is love. When a community is directed to this as its essential priority, ordinary limitations imposed on human relations by egoism become, as it were, flipped around. Where there was self-seeking there becomes service. Where there was desire for self-protection there becomes an impulse to lead others to fulfillment through love.

It is probably a little-known fact that the great Mark Williams, co-author of the now-legendary Mindfulness - a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world, as well as being director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, is a priest and indeed a canon of Christ Church cathedral. The prospect of inviting him to Wychwood Circle and giving him the topic "Mindfulness, and then ...?" to address is a tempting one. 

In the meantime one could be forgiven for having further thoughts about obstacles - whether to climbing the mountain or making that inner journey, or even going to church - and what indeed it is, since Spufford and the former Bishop of Edinburgh are our current themes, to be a Christian. There is a widespread feeling that to be a Christian is to sign up to a set of propositions. It may be in practice, and for some that may even be crucial. But for others (both mountaineers and meditators) it is surely enough to say that a Christian is a follower of Christ ... whatever you conceive him to be. 

If Jesus is/was more than a first-century man in the Middle East, then he is certainly not to be delineated for all time by a Church Creed put together some time in the 4th century under political pressure, or a Book of Common Prayer put together under various English kings and queens from Henry VIII onward between 1549 and 1662, or even the New Revised Standard Version (Anglicised, Catholic Edition, etc) of the Bible in the late twentieth century!

In 2014 you can discover a lot about Jesus, or at least of the God of whom he spoke, by your own delving into bits of the gospels which make sense to you, by dipping into 2000 years, and more, of philosophy and theology, by being inspired by artists and poets and nature, by listening to contemporary writers and preachers, and by your own contemplation/meditation/prayer. (Note the word 'and' in that last sentence...) 

Anticipating our next book by Richard Holloway we could quote, in the context of the above reflections, a poem by Yehuda Amichai which he quotes in an earlier book of his, Doubts and Loves: 

     And a whisper will be heard in the place
     where the ruined
     house once stood.

To finish as we began with the unfathomable TS Eliot: 
     
     We shall not cease from exploration
     And the end of all our exploring
     Will be to arrive where we started
     And know the place for the first time.




On February 9th Wychwood Circle will meet to discuss Richard Holloway's Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt. 7pm- 9pm at the library in High Street, Milton under Wychwood, OX7 6LD.

MORE THAN ONE WAY UP THE MOUNTAIN

Far more can be mended than you know

Spufford in his Unapologetic was highly articulate in talking about the value of experience, of re-thinking and re-telling the Christian story, in seeing how the story and the subsequent theology can resonate in the modern mind and make “hopeful” and “realistic sense”.  It’s interesting to find two highly respected reviewers giving the book much more than the time of day – and also that they both quote all or some of Spufford’s final paragraph.  It bears quoting here:

“If, that is, there is a God.  There may well not be.  I don’t know whether there is.  And neither do you, and neither does Richard bloody Dawkins, and neither does anyone.  It not being, as mentioned before, a knowable item.  What I do know is that, when I am lucky, when I have managed to pay attention, when for once I have hushed my noise for a little while, it can feel as if there is one. And so it makes emotional sense to proceed as if He’s there; to dare the conditional.  And not timid death-fearing emotional sense, or cowering craven master-seeking sense, or censorious holier-than-thou sense. Hopeful sense. Realistic sense. Battered-about-but-still-trying sense. The sense recommended by our awkward sky fairy who says: don’t be careful. Don’t be surprised by any human cruelty. But don’t be afraid. Far more can be mended than you know.”

In our discussions in Wychwood Library, we recognised the strengths of his argument and admired his bravery in laying bare his soul and describing in detail his own experience and raw thinking.  But our focus nevertheless returned to some of the objections to religious belief in general, and perhaps Spufford’s version of Christianity (eloquent though it is) in particular. Some of the routine arguments resurfaced in a way that Julian Baggini once described so mischievously:

“The most vocal atheists and the believers who take their bait appear ever more like a long-married couple who prefer the familiarity of their dysfunctional relationship to the emptiness that lies beyond amicable divorce. They trade the same old niggles and complaints with no hope or expectation of mutual understanding.”

The Chisholm Trail

Two images came up in the final stages of the discussion, neither of which is original.  When Andy Thayer from the Chase Benefice (Chadlington etc) spoke to us in September he compared the Christian, or even the religious, experience to the Chisholm Trail in North America: it’s so wide that it can be seen from space, and the countless pilgrims and searchers on the religious trail to our own Chicago (where in the 19th century cattle fetched a much higher price) can join it from many directions, pursue their own particular route along the trail, never meet more than a handful of the others, and still reach their goal.

The other image is the old one of the mountain with one peak but many slopes. God is the peak – so high as to be hidden in the clouds, so that even to begin the ascent requires some sort of faith and/or hope. And some of us are engaged on the climb on our own familiar side of the mountain, while others are trekking up another slope. Some of them we can see, some of them we can compare notes with, some of them we’ve only heard of, and no doubt some are right round the other side of the mountain and we can only guess that maybe they are pursuing much the same goal along a totally different path: we’re all facing upwards towards the top of the mountain.  

Different paths up the same mountain

The analogy is normally used to describe the equivalence of different established traditions and religions in speaking about God and portraying the religious life. But maybe it is equally apt as an image for those around our Circle in the library in West Oxfordshire on a Sunday night, and all the others not present as well. All of us who have ever given ‘spiritual things’ (or just ‘serious things’) a thought are probably somewhere on the lower slopes of that mountain, whatever we conceive it to represent. Many are out of sight, others are really quite close by, some have – alas – tried to prevent others getting up it, or just insisted that they climb a prescribed path. 

What we all share is that the slope can be steep (even if the views are rewarding) and characterised by a great number of obstacles and distractions which get in the way of an easy ascent – and in many cases put us off altogether.  The obstacles could be our religious instruction at school or church, the Bible, the church, even Jesus – or at least what we’ve been told about him. The distractions could be science, or consumerism, or shallow living.  Name your favourite and add to the list!

Yet obstacles and distractions can be either side-stepped or overcome. There is no reason why a mountaineer should climb a mountain in a straight line, let alone follow a well-beaten track. And if you are finding the going hard, or getting nowhere, or coming across the same old vertical cliff face or soggy ground which prevent further progress, why not choose a slightly different path? Or maybe a radically different one? By all means, stand still and consider the options, but don’t give up, and don’t go back down again!

Religion was made for man

To coin a phrase – one which Jesus is not reported to have said, but might well have done – religion is made for man, not man for religion.  If yours doesn’t work, try another. Don’t be brow-beaten by your parents, your religious leaders, your childhood experience, the idols which it’s much more cool to worship …  – don’t let anyone or any bad experience stand in your way.

And the final question – and the final analogy of the mountain – is one you may have seen coming.  Why climb the mountain at all? Why aim for the invisible peak? I think someone else answered that once before (and I’ve no idea whether he was religious or not): because it’s there.

February 9th: At our next meeting we discuss LEAVING ALEXANDRIA: A MEMOIR OF FAITH AND DOUBT by Richard Holloway - the former Bishop of Edinburgh who resigned from his office and left the church as his doubts increased. (Canongate, 2012)

It could be interesting to make the link from Spufford to Holloway by reading this review of Unapologetic by Richard Holloway: Guardian Sept 2012

March 9th: We are pleased to have been able to invite Dr Nicola Slee to join us for this meeting and her topic will be POETRY AND FAITH. Please come and bring friends. 

SPREAD-OUT THEOLOGY

Theologically spread out

I recently came across – and warmed to – a suggestion by Daniel Hardy (Finding the church, SCM, London 2000) that “we need to learn to think of Christian faith as by nature spread out, as something extended by its spread-out-ness.”  This contrasts with the traditional tendency to think in concentrated terms, focusing on Bible, church, beliefs, certainties, and it appeals to Alison Webster, who in her introduction to a book on the church and society warns readers of her own preference for “theological ‘spread-out-ness’”.  

Webster goes on: “Some readers will no doubt think it so spread out as not to qualify as ‘theology’ at all.” (Wellbeing, SCM, London 2002) But she also quotes theologian Stephen Pattison who characterises contemporary theology as “a kind of whispered conversation on matters esoteric conducted in a foreign language behind closed doors in a distant attic” (Political Theology journal, 2000).  It is certainly true of much traditional religious language that it is not helpful in analysing contemporary issues – either for oneself, or in communicating them to our own culture. 

Translation

Later in the same book, Webster quotes the phrase ‘the story-formed community of the church' to make the point that the Christian story does not resonate for everyone.  I like the comparison Jeanette Winterson has drawn between an artist and a translator (quoted in Webster, p 124, and see below) and the parallel Webster makes between artist and religious person:

"For the Christian, for instance, the question is: how to pass into the secular world the insights of one's Christian heritage? How to tell the Christian story in that context? But also, crucially, the question must be put the other way round: how to pass back into the corporate christocentric language of the church the insights of the other languages?"

'Smart-arse'  

Our current reading matter at Wychwood Circle is the “tumultuously challenging” Unapologetic by Francis Spufford (Faber, London 2012).  Someone in the group spoke for several who can’t bear his style when she said that he wrote like a ‘smart-arse’.  (Given his own free, not to say abrasive, use of language, he could hardly object to such a blunt description...) But the point was also made that this did at least make a refreshing change from pompous preachers, sentimental hymns and fervent evangelists.

Jeanette's point ("The artist is a translator... ") is surely relevant to the idea of replacing stuffy old Christian language with contemporary parlance, even if the temptation is to overdo it.  Spufford is using very modern (some said, juvenile) language to address a very modern audience.  Maybe his primary audience is indeed our teenagers who are normally so completely switched off by any religious rhetoric. In this, we should say (in a rather quainter style): all power to his elbow!

The world, the flesh (or the 'human propensity' etc) and the devil 

A four-letter word crops up persistently in Unapologetic, usually – and fortunately – within an abbreviation (the ‘HPtFtU’), itself a deliberate euphemism for another unacceptable word, ‘sin’.  His point is that, whatever we believe about religion, we know that we do as humans have a natural propensity to muck things up.  This concept turns out to be central to his argument and it has become topical this week with the current controversy over changes to the wording of the baptism in Anglican churches. 

The ‘devil’ has been cast out of the baptism service – experimentally at least.  And not before time, given that no-one has talked of him/her/it seriously for a good many years now. Inevitably there will be a backlash from more traditional worshippers who see this as abandoning the concept of sin. Yet Spufford places this concept (or his modern formulation) at the centre of his defence of modern Christianity, and as crucial to the “emotional sense” which his title promises.  His chapter heading uses the words of the singer Leonard Cohen, “The Crack in Everything”.  

Andrew Brown is worth reading on the current controversy in the Guardian this week (Article Jan 6th), where he talks about trying “to rescue the meaning of sin so that it recovers some of its primal sense of wrongness.” He goes on: “This is an almost novelistic endeavour, but Francis Spufford had a good go at it in Unapologetic.”

Sunday 12th January at Wychwood Library

On Sunday we continue our discussion of Spufford’s book, focusing on all or any of the final 5 chapters, from the unputdownable chapter on “Yeshua” to the final “Consequences”. Join us at Wychwood Library (OX7 6LD) from 7pm. 

MAKING SURPRISING EMOTIONAL SENSE

UNAPOLOGETIC - WHY, DESPITE EVERYTHING, CHRISTIANITY CAN STILL MAKE SURPRISING EMOTIONAL SENSE

Francis Spufford (Faber 2012) 

There was a lively discussion on December 1st of a lively and provocative book. Reactions to Francis Spufford's style varied from the negative (childish, unnecessarily crude language, verbose) to the positive (at least he sounds modern and not stuffy). What can't be denied is that Spufford uses his twenty-first century writing skills to create a fresh and fluent account of one man's experience of, and reflections on, religion, specifically Christianity. 

In Chapter Two, The Crack in Everything, he argues what we all know, that both we and the world we live in are hardly the way we would really like them to be.  Call it broken, or use the F word, but it's not surprising that some people meditate on this and wonder if there is an answer beyond our trivial daily concerns or the flattering image that our advertisers help us to believe about ourselves. He ends the chapter thus:

The crack in everything is here to stay. So one thing we do … is to turn towards the space where the possibility exists that there might be someone to hear us … To turn towards a space in which there is quite possibly no one – in which, we think as we find ourselves doing it, that there probably is no one.
And we say: Hello? Hello? …

It won't bother you if you don't bother it

This leads directly to Chapter Three, Big Daddy, which begins: 'And nothing happens. ... Well, we've arrived at God, or at God's absence'. But he goes on to give a long account of his own experience of meditating in quiet places such as churches: 

Churches are vessels of hush, as well as everything else they are, and when I block out the distractions of vision, the silence is almost shockingly loud. 

It's best to read it for yourself but the result is that 'something makes itself felt from beyond or behind or beneath it all', 'it seems to shine ... with lightless light', and he's honest and aware enough to comment that 'what you've experienced is an absolutely bog-standard piece of transcendence'.  

There were other accounts at Wychwood Library of experiences of transcendence. What was more equivocal was how, why or whether these led one to reconsider what the great religions have to say about such experiences and what lies behind them. Clearly for Spufford they have done and you can only really glean with how much reality and sense - as well as emotion - by reading his own words in context. 

Hello, Cruel World

One could be disappointed by Chapter 4. Spufford has seemed to promise so much.  But Spufford is also strikingly honest. He won’t just tell you that he can’t solve the problem of pain (if he could, he’d be Regius Professor of Divinity by now); he’ll also take you through each of the historic solutions (“theodicies”) and make sure you aren’t taken in by them, even if thousands or millions have been, through wishful thinking or otherwise.

But then he stops and says:

And that’s about the end of what argument can do for us.
How then do we deal with suffering? How do we resolve the contradiction between cruel world and loving God? The short answer is that we don’t. We don’t try to, mostly. Most Christian believers don’t spend their time and their emotional energy stuck at this point of contradiction. …
We don’t forget, mind. … The impasse is still there. It’s just that we’re not in the jaws of it. … Our feelings have moved on elsewhere. Because there is a long answer, too, to the question of suffering;  a specifically Christian perception of what God is, which helps us to move on.  (pp 104-106)

... We don’t say that God’s in his Heaven and all’s right with the world: not deep down. We say: all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it, with us. We don’t have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story. (p107)

 And this is the prelude to chapter 5 (Yeshua), which is the most extraordinary tour de force of narrating a very old story in a very fresh way. I was well and truly gripped by this re-telling of lots and lots of bits of the story of Jesus in a thoroughly modern, intelligible way. Billy Graham has nothing on Francis Spufford.

You have to read it. It would be impossible to produce excerpts or summaries. It’s 39 pages but it’s worth the investment. What he does say before ending ch 4 is about praying, or rather who he prays to, and hence the essence of what Christianity is about.

When I pray...

Straight after the passage quoted above, he goes on:

When I pray, I am not praying to a philosophically complicated absentee creator. When I manage to pay attention to the continual love song, I am not trying to envisage the impossible-to-imagine domain beyond the universe. … I look across, not up; I look into the world, not away. When I pray I see a face, a human face among other human faces. It is a face in an angry crowd …  [I]f  you are a Christian you do not believe that the characteristic of the God of everything is to mould the universe powerfully from afar. For  a Christian the most essential thing God does in time, in all of human history, is to be that man in the crowd… (p107-108)

... Which leads to the page-turner that is Chapter 5, 'Yeshua' (later latinized to Jesus). 


There are 3 more chapters after this, ending with Chapter 8, 'Consequences'. We have set ourselves to read all the remaining 5 chapters for January 12th at Wychwood Library, from 7 to 9pm. Since all agreed that there is a lot there - even if sometimes hidden in the verbiage, as one could, unkindly, put it - we thought we would all pick out our favourite chapter or passage and bring it before the group to discuss. We may well run out of time... 
February 9th is already earmarked for Richard Holloway's Leaving Alexandria. And on March 9th we welcome poet and theologian Nicola Slee to lead a session on Faith and Poetry. 

THE SIMPLE AND UNSURPRISING STRUCTURE OF FAITH

UNAPOLOGETIC: why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense  Francis Spufford (Faber 2012)

Bertrand Russell was recently quoted in an article by Andy Fitzgerald (An agnostic defends religion). He wrote: 

I do not think that the real reason that people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. 

After describing his own early experience of religion at a funeral mass 'in a large and gorgeous Catholic church' and later when studying in the Middle East, Fitzgerald concludes: 

It's likely that religion's popularity is a product of emotion, fear of mortality and the unknown, and yes, fealty to tradition. But just like scientific and social inquiry, religion can serve a meaningful and positive role in individual and collective struggles, from the banal to the seemingly unbearable.  I do not have religious belief, but I also will not disparage the benefits many draw from theirs. 

Despite his best efforts, this seems patronising and disparaging to people of faith and it is the sort of attitude which our new 'study book' at Wychwood Circle aims to take on. Faith can be both intelligent and meaningful, maybe all the more so when its practitioners are neither pious nor over-intellectual. 

On December 1st local members of Wychwood Circle will meet at Wychwood library to discuss the first three chapters of Francis Spufford's recent book, Unapologetic. Theo Hobson in the TLS reviewed it thus: 

The point ... is to show those on the fence that belief need not mean the abandonment of intelligence, wit, emotional honesty. In this, Francis Spufford succeeds to an exceptional degree. 

And Metro's reviewer described Spufford as 'an honest, modern religious voice to engage fellow Christians and detractors alike'. 

Spufford was Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1997 and is better known for literary anthologies and a collection of essays about the history of technology. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  Here he takes up the theme of church-going in the 21st century in a fresh, not to say brash, way and he is not afraid to sound journalistic and to use four-letter words to make his point. 

In his first chapter he takes issue with the famous - if short-lived - London bus slogan, 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life'. He also inverts the normal perception that belief is mysterious, peculiar, or delusional: 

In my experience it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things... It's belief which demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending. 

He then promises to mount a defence of the emotions involved in religious belief, often seen nowadays as 'alien, freakish, sad, embarrassing, humiliating, embarrassing, immature, pathetic'. He will not be setting out what Christians believe in, nor a defence of Christian ideas, he says, but 'a defence of Christian emotions - of their intelligibility, of their grown-up dignity'. 


Sunday, December 1st, 7 - 9 pm at Wychwood Library: a discussion based on the opening 3 chapters of Francis Spufford's book Unapologetic. Anyone is free to join us. 

WAKE UP! THE WORLD IS CHANGING

SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT GOD?

“Spirituality means waking up.” Thus begins a book entitled Awareness by Anthony de Mello (Doubleday, 1992). He continues: “Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. … They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.”

Nikki Leader (http://www.nikkileader.co.uk/) comes to Wychwood Circle on Nov 10^th to tell us: “Wake up! The world is changing”.  Her fascinating website refers to the challenge of ‘exploring consciousness beyond our physical and material universe’ and she has promised to give us ‘a history of the ages from a spiritual perspective’.  

We live in an age when it is much more trendy to be ‘spiritual but not religious’ than the other way round – although many will of course reject any notion of spirituality as airy-fairy, not science-based or provable, and therefore ok for some but not for the intellectually rigorous.

Philip Sheldrake bravely tackled the subject in his recent Spirituality – A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012) and suggested that we know experientially and not just because our parents or teachers told us so, that ‘as human beings we are naturally driven by goals beyond physical satisfaction or mental supremacy’.  He also concluded that ‘a full human life needs to move beyond self-absorption to a sense of the greater good and service of others’.  … Discuss!  That quotation would make a great motion for a debate.

I like the third part of his conclusion which sees spirituality as ‘a process of unlocking the creativity and imagination that enables us to touch the edge of mystery.’  For me this is a large part of what I would most want to explore, whether at church, meeting house or Sunday assembly, or in Wychwood Library at our monthly discussions.

Harnessing new energies

Nikki Leader’s introduction to our event on November 10^th says she will offer

a spiritual perspective on what is, and has been happening since the end of the Mayan calender 2012. A short history of the ages humans have lived through, their effects and how we can all harness these new energies as long as we are prepared for change individually and globally.

Harnessing energies and being prepared to change? These both sound like something people of traditional faiths should be doing daily - and maybe some from less traditional faiths or no faith at all.  So the overlap between religion and Nikki's brand of spiritual direction (she is a professional spiritual adviser, or Soul Practitioner) will be fascinating to regular members of Wychwood Circle as much as to many newcomers and occasional visitors.

And what if you've never intended to be either religious or spiritual? Well, come along if you dare and be prepared to be challenged to 'wake up' and look further and differently at your world.  I picked up de Mello's Awareness only this morning and by chance, but I note that he ends his first short chapter with these words - which may or may not echo Nikki Leader's approach: 

Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It's irritating to be woken up. That's the reason the wise guru will not attempt to wake people up. ... My business is to do my thing, to dance my dance. If you profit from it, fine; if you don't, too bad!  As the Arabs say, 'The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.'

We are grateful to Nikki Leader for agreeing to join us as a guest speaker on Sunday November 10th at Wychwood Library from 7pm to 9pm.

WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL, TOUCHING AND WISE

I enjoyed half-an-hour with a cappucino and Alain de Botton in Blackwell’s the other day. It’s great: you can read a chapter and then put him back on the shelf.  The book in question, which demanded to be dipped into, was Religion for Atheists, grist to the mill when you’re into exploring the boundaries of theology.  The author graciously admits that religions can be ‘sporadically useful, interesting and consoling’ and then goes on to write a whole book about how to pick out what they have to offer. Anyone who is serious about life (someone on this page recently described ‘being spiritual’ as precisely that) might want to do the same, positively but less patronisingly.

De Botton’s starting point is as good as any and would have chimed in with Reverend Andrew Thayer’s presentation to Wychwood Circle earlier this month (“Thank God I’m an atheist”). It is neatly summed up in this  sentence:

It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting.

It’s a bit long to go on the bottom of our Wychwood Circle posters but it would make a good advert for our discussions.  He ends his first chapter with the words of our heading – he says he wants to 'rescue what is beautiful, touching and wise from what no longer seems true'.

Had we managed to organise a head-to-head between Alain and Andrew, I suspect the latter would have wanted to know just what it is that “no longer seems true” to Alain and then mostly agreed with him.  Andrew gave us a brief but lucid, and welcome, exposition of a twenty-first-century - as contrasted with a first-century - view of three aspects of his faith, under the headings Cosmology, Biology, and Christology. There are plenty of present-day Christians who would not agree with that contemporary view and they have a lot to answer for in terms of making Christianity both incomprehensible and irrelevant to people’s twenty-first century lives.  But in the spirit of de Botton and ‘postmodern’ theologians we do better to look for what is meaningful rather than what isn’t.

Andrew Thayer showed us how you can leave behind the first century view of the universe as ‘heaven above and hell below’, for instance, and yet retain that first-century ‘sense of infinitude’; that a present-day view of 'salvation' would need to ask, salvation how and from what?, but that a Christian can still see Jesus Christ having a key role in revealing that elusive mystery to us;  that a one-line description of what Christ was about (such as a favourite Bible quotation or a phrase from the Book of Common Prayer) will be as inadequate as describing Martin Luther King by the single phrase for which he is now famous.

Andrew’s most telling analogy – surprisingly for us, but appropriately for a Texan – was probably the Chisholm Trail in the States.  This is a two-mile wide cattle trail from Texas to Chicago, one of several visible from space and dating from the days when cattle fetched 10 times as much in Chicago as it did in Texas.  He compared this vast trail to the Christian tradition: it’s very long and it’s very wide and you’ll never use it all up.  Any atheistic critique of religion cannot therefore afford to be either narrow or binary.  And as John Macquarrie (former Professor of Divinity at Oxford University) wrote in his Principles of Christian Theology, in an understatement passing almost as a throwaway remark: 'The idea of God has undergone many changes in the course of its history.' *

Macquarrie, incidentally, points out in the same chapter:  ‘the word atheism must also be understood in relation to what it denies. Presumably most modern men deny the the gods of mythology, and so from the point of view of a believer in these gods, they are atheists.’ An atheist friend of mine recently related that there have been around 2600 ‘noted and recognised gods’ over the years and that this makes us all atheists regarding the 2599 even if we are monotheists.  The point is that you cannot be an atheist without describing what it is you don’t believe in and therein lies the weakness and sterility of the argy-bargy of the ‘new atheist’ debates: we probably agree about a good 99% of what we don’t believe in.  Better to begin with De Botton and at least explore, as he entitles his first chapter, ‘Wisdom without doctrine’, even if you don't go any further.

On October 6^th we meet again at Wychwood Library to explore the very positive theme of “What guides our choices”.  Ian Cave has kindly offered to lead the discussion and there is a short piece entitled Blindness in Springtime which will act as a springboard for people’s ideas, beginning: “If I had my life over again…” Plenty of scope for wisdom, with or without doctrine, there. 

* Macquarrie, in his monumental modern study of the Principles of Christian Theology (SCM Press, 1966, 1977) devoted the first third of the book to Philosophical Theology, where amongst much else besides he traces these changes from the mythological level through traditional theism to what he calls ‘the phase of existential-ontological theism’.  Macquarrie’s systematic ‘philosophical theology’ is worth looking up, particularly if you have any sympathy with existentialism – as he does, for instance comparing Sartre’s conclusions with the religious one.  In the light of our Wychwood Circle discussions, it is interesting to find a Canon of Christ Church, Oxford stating (at the start of chapter 5 on Being and God): ‘It has already been made abundantly clear that faith is not primarily assent to propositions, but an existential attitude of acceptance and commitment.’ From this point of view it probably reduced his appeal to our very mixed audience that Andrew Thayer began his talk with an elaborate reference to the Church’s Nicene Creed  – but then he is an Anglican priest as well as a theologian and it was arguably a suitable if provocative point of departure, given our topic.