Christianity faces
extinction - and it is not science but Christians themselves who are to
blame for its demise
AN WILSON
he millennium is the anniversary of
an event that we no longer believe: namely, the birth of Almighty God in
human form in a stable in Bethlehem.
How, at this date in history, could we possibly claim that
Christianity was literally true? But those who were in the vanguard of
destroying the Christian faith over the past 200 years were not a tiny
handful of atheist philosophers and agnostic scientists. It was the
Christians themselves. Christianity will decline yet further in the next
1 000 years to the point of near extinction - because Christians
themselves no longer believe it to be true.
If you went to a theological seminary, or a university where religion
was being taught; if you went to a college where they were training
ministers of the gospel; if you studied the Bible using the most
searching and honest commentaries, written by men and women who devoted
a lifetime of scholarship to the subject, you would find only a minority
of these scholars professing old-fashioned, fully orthodox Christian
beliefs.
You would find that many of them were priests or ministers of their
particular church. You would find that they attended the various rites
of those churches. But ask them: "Do you believe that God Almighty took
human flesh in the person of Jesus?" and I suspect you would find only a
minority able to say an unambiguous "Yes!"
Do they believe that Jesus was born in Bethlehem? Only a tiny handful
of Bible scholars believe that. Fewer, I should guess, believe he was
born of a virgin. Many would say that they believed in the Resurrection,
but ask them to say whether they believe in the gospel accounts of an
empty tomb, and you will find that they do not.
You would, of course, find plenty of rabbis who interpret the Jewish
scriptures in more or less the same way that rabbis were reading the
Bible in the lifetime of Jesus. You would find nearly all Muslim
scholars and imams reading the holy Qur'an in exactly the same sense as
that in which it was written in the 7th century. That is because you can
still have interesting, plausible arguments about God and morality,
whereas so much of Christian myth is falsifiable. It makes truth claims
that are not true. Christianity came to a crisis point 150 years ago
when all these skeletons came out of its cupboard. German biblical
scholars were taking the Bible to bits at just the moment when the
scientists were casting doubt on the very idea of a Creator.
Of course, you can still go on believing that there is a God after
reading Darwin's Origin of Species. Darwin's discoveries did,
however, for many earnest seekers after truth, remove any need to find
purpose in nature or a mind behind the universe. Darwin revealed a
process that was self-sufficient, which did not need a deus ex
machina. Or indeed a deus - a god - of any kind.
A remarkable fact about the history of English Christianity, and in
particular of Anglicanism in the middle of the 20th century, was the
large number of poets and novelists who explored the faith and its
implications in their writings.
Think of Dorothy L Sayers, Charles Williams, the CS Lewis of the
science-fiction trilogy and Narnia, or Barbara Pym - all in their
different ways exploring church or religious life on an imaginative
scale that would have surprised their parents' agnostic generation.
One remembers Ivy Compton-Burnett's impatience with her contemporary
Rose Macaulay when she read her final novel, The Towers of
Trebizond, and realised that Rose had returned to the faith. "Why
can't she remain a perfectly sensible agnostic like everyone else?"
Two writers stand out, to my mind, in this period who were most
defiant in their refusal to be perfectly sensible agnostics: the first
is TS Eliot, the second his sometime pupil, John Betjeman.
If I think again of this place,
and of people, not
wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But some
particular genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in
the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and
abroad,
and of one who died blind and quiet,
Why should we
celebrate these dead
men more than the dying?
This
is one of those resonant passages of the Four Quartets that must
have thrilled the generation of Christians who first read it, as much as
it dismayed those who felt that literature should move on, leaving this
old baggage behind us. There will be many now, I suspect, to whom the
lines are incomprehensible.
"We cannot restore old policies/ Or follow an antique drum" becomes a
prophecy that applies directly to the inner life of Eliot's own church -
a church that seemed so alive when Betjeman was worshipping in it:
Wonder beyond Time's wonders,
that Bread so white
and small
Veiled in golden curtains,
too mighty for men to see,
Is the Power which sends the
shadows up this polychrome wall,
Is God who created the planet, the
chain-smoking millions and
me;
Beyond the throb of the engines is
the throbbing heart of
all -
Christ, at this Highbury altar,
I offer myself to Thee.
It is impossible not to be moved by this poem.
Equally, it is difficult to imagine anyone writing it nowadays, yet it
was published only 50 years ago.
Those of us who read the poetry of Milton without a grounding in
classical literature are forever fumbling about in footnotes trying to
find out where the fountain of Arethusa was. We're hardly reading - we
are engaged in minor archaeology. No echoes occur.
Eliot was trying to bring back, by means of pastiche architecture,
the echoes of Dante, Shakespeare, Sanskrit and Mother Julian of Norwich
into our common language so that we could speak with shared images and
symbols.
Without shared images and symbols, religion does not function. Nor
does literature. Future generations will be deaf to both.
Since the 19th century there have been strides forward in the field
of biblical scholarship, and this is something in which we can all
rejoice. Inevitably it would lead to fresh translations of the Bible as
new understanding emerged. But did it really necessitate the abolition
of the 17th-century translation in its liturgical context?
The church of Rome had been tinkering with its liturgy throughout the
20th century, altering the Easter ceremonies in ways barely noticeable
to those who were not obsessives. But what can have possessed it to
abolish the so-called Tridentine mass, a liturgy which was in essence
1 000 years older than the Council of Trent?
Eager to show that it could be as modern as Rome, the Church of
England, which had a perfectly good vernacular liturgy, and which had
developed since 1928 a perfectly workable way of adding local variations
to it, chose to concoct what is quite possibly the most disgracefully
ugly, unmemorable liturgy devised in the history of the human race.
It makes all its addresses to the Godhead seem like police statements
read back to an unfortunate victim in the dock. "From age to age you
gathered a people to yourself." How inelegant, and how meaningless, to
have changed the immemorial liturgical exchange "Dominus Vobiscum. Et
cum spiritu tuo" into "The Lord be with you. And also with you." It
recalls the exchanges of schoolchildren: "The same to you with brass
knobs on."
Why did they do it? What blasphemous arrogance possessed them? Why
did they think that their decades - the 1960s and 1970s - were so
superior to anything that had gone before that they could uproot, change
and uglify time-honoured liturgical routines that had sustained the
generation of Queen Elizabeth, of Launcelot Andrews, and the Royal
Martyr; of Pepys and Dryden and Queen Anne; of Dean Swift and Samuel
Johnson; of Coleridge and Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott (who was
converted from Presbyterianism by the liturgy alone); of the Victorian
doubters, and those - Eliot, Betjeman and Macaulay included - who in the
20th century returned blinking with amazement to the altar of God?
In each case, what they returned to was the faith embodied in certain
words that had always been adapted, modified and altered in small ways,
but which remained fundamentally the same. The modernists called for the
old symbols and words to be interpreted in ways that made sense to
modern people. And in many cases, that meant not interpreting them at
all.
Most of us who have felt time spent in church was unwasted recall
either moments of silence, or moments when music was playing. But
utterly to change the words and the furniture! This removes the
possibility of partaking in the one shared symbol. It introduces new and
facile expressions that grate on the ear, and destroys one of the
principal functions of liturgical recitations, whether of the scriptures
or of the sacramental mystery - namely, that one generation passes on to
the next the words and experiences of its predecessors.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and
bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the
moment of
the yew tree
Are of equal duration. A people
without history
Is not redeemed from time, for
history is a pattern
Of
timeless moments ...
The liturgy was above all a
pattern of timeless moments, daily repeated in quires and places where
they sing. It was a far more important function of the church than
Thought for the Day, or the woefully misdirected attempts to
speak in the language of young people, or to teach imagined categories
of being far beyond the ken of the average parson - such as ordinary
people, or people in inner cities. The liturgy was for all sorts and
conditions of people; its failure to attempt relevance was what made it
timelessly and irreplaceably relevant.
There is no point in Latin Mass societies or prayer book societies.
Much as we sympathise with the die-hards and the nostalgic brigade, they
are crying to the moon. The damage was done when common prayer ceased to
be common prayer and when in the great Western church a unifying
language - far more unifying than Esperanto, a truly universal tongue in
which the human race could voice its deepest prayers and yearnings in a
debased version of the language of the Caesars - was replaced by the
Babel-sound of multilingual masses.
How might faith be communicated to a future age, or how might it be
understood imaginatively by writers? I don't see how it can be now,
because its common language has been vandalised by the clergy.
While the new Book of Common Worship nominally contains some
of the older liturgy for alternative use, one wonders how many clergymen
will actually use it. We hate the clergy for this, and it is one of the
reasons that many of us, who used to love the church, and who still love
the old buildings and the ancient music, find that our affection for the
institutional church has all but evaporated.
I am talking about that Barbara Pymish love of all things churchy -
it is hard to imagine many imaginative people sustaining it in the
future. Her own diaries reflect the distress and disappointment felt by
a pious woman in central London in search of unwrecked liturgy in her
lunch hour. There was something so arrogant about the changes. They
implied that we could throw away what had been for others the means of
grace, the symbols of the ultimate mystery, and make up our own version.
Typical of the ethos is the habit that came in, almost as soon as the
liturgy changed, of spontaneous homilies being spoken after the gospel -
as though the busy office worker would want to hear five minutes of
banal thoughts made up on the spur of the moment - rather than the old
words, the tried and trusted words, the words which, worn and smooth
like old, well-trodden stones, had been heard so often before and which
had so often nourished and sustained, regardless of the doubts and
dryness of those who heard them.
I cannot see how Christianity can survive in anything like the form
that previous generations of Christians, for the last 1950 years, would
have recognised as Christian, now that it has departed from the concept
of an orally transmitted faith.
The leadership of the churches is dishonest. There is no other word
for it - unless you add cowardly. They have been theologically educated.
They know that concepts such as the physical resurrection and the virgin
birth are not "true" as history. But they do not dare, even at the
beginning of this new millennium, to rock the boat. As a result, nearly
all of us stay outside the church and watch its decline with a mixture
of sorrow and schadenfreude. What else does an organisation
expect, which so consistently refuses to be intellectually serious?
We come to church to be serious and we expect serious responses to
the doubts and philosophical changes that have happened to all of us in
the past 200 years.
We do not expect kindergarten squabbles about miracles. Christianity
invented a way of looking at human nature and the inner life which is
part and parcel of our very civilisation. It invented the inner life -
well, St Augustine in many ways invented the inner life.
There is no need to believe in consciousness; many psychologists from
William James onwards would say there was no such thing. There is no
need to believe in individualism; the physicalist school of psychology/
philosophy would discourage any such faith. Yet many of us feel that not
to nourish these myths is to erode an important part of our
self-consciousness, not only as individuals but as a society.
The novel - the great expression of the idea that there are millions
of people flitting about the planet being different from one another -
derives directly from the Christian fiction of a soul. Christian artists
are often those who have managed a synthesis of ideas which appear to
destroy the old but actually invigorate it.
Think of Dante, who almost single-handedly made Aquinas imaginatively
accessible. Aquinas was the genius who fashioned the discoveries of Arab
mathematics and logic, the writings of Averroes, the rediscovery of
Aristotle - none of them compatible with Christian orthodoxies - into a
new synthesis by which the human race could understand itself, talk to
itself, for another 400 years. What happened in the 19th century was
that no Aquinas arose, no Dante to absorb Darwinism, determinism,
Freudianism or Marxian materialism, or "perfectly sensible agnosticism".
Now that the habit of learning the old Christian stories and prayers
has all but died out, now that Christianity has turned itself back into
a sect, there really seems to be no future. There will be Christians in
the next generation, but we can be sadly certain that there will be no
Christian literature - that came to an end with the generation of Eliot.
Yet many human beings would still wish to echo the first great modern
metaphysician, Immanuel Kant, when he said: "Two things fill the mind
with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often we
reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within
me."
When all the mythologies of religion have been discarded and when all
the false theories of Christianity have been exposed by patient and
honest scholars, men and women of a reflective turn of mind will remain
convinced that there is underlying the universe a deep moral purpose.
Lose this sense of seriousness and life becomes unendurable. Most of us
are too busy to follow the intricacies of Kant's philosophical
journeying, but we believe these things in our gut. There is a religion
that satisfies this deep human need for a moral code without a
mythology. It is not Christianity.
The mullahs and the imams of Islam preach the same undiluted message
which was first given to the world by the Holy Prophet in the 6th and
7th centuries. While the West tries to dub the followers of Islam
fundamentalist lunatics, increasing numbers of people turn to the Qur'an
and find in this book what they have always craved: a moral and an
intellectual acknowledgement of the lordship of God without the
encumbrance of Christian mythological baggage in which almost no one
really believes. That is why Christianity will decline in this
millennium, and the next religious hunger of the human heart will be
answered by the Crescent, not by the Cross.
This is an edited extract from AN Wilson's essay Christianity and
Modernity
-- The Mail&Guardian, December 5, 2000.
