KINDLING INTEREST
I N a nation which is by common consent post- Christian, it is .a matter of some surprise to those on the fringe of the Church that it still 'commands enough public interest to occupy, for instance, 8 per cent of Independent Tele- vision viewing time in 1963 (as against 9 per cent for plays and serials); that it should appear regularly on TWTWTW; in the Young Publishers' Revue; on the magazine front of the Observer; that a book on doctrine by a bishop should be news. It is less surprising, per- haps, that the Methodist-Anglican discussions on Church unity should have received so much press coverage, because this is a matter which could not Only affect the social life, but also the legal position of the Church of England; but what is not so much surprising as appalling to an earlier generation of agnostic humanists is that their own offspring, no less radical than they, and much less easily taken in by specious causes—the post-Aldermaston generation which TW has so neatly spitted—returns to the Chris- tian religion so regularly. There could be two reasons for this. One is that the churches as organisations or fellowships Still represent, in a deracine world, a sociological Phenomenon—groups of people uniting together for activities that are tied by no common pro- fession or other ostensible interest. In the Provinces this is less wondered at, since fellow- ships of one sort and another are still the norm, but in the metropolitan world inhabited by iournalists, editors, TV men—the sort that have a disproportionate say in mass as well as posh eftimunications—living has largely fragmented; outside the family unit there is little loyalty except (in some cases) to an organisation which PaYs the salaries. Evenings and weekends are spent not in organised fellowships but in a social pattern which conceals from its less successful members a deep loneliness and deprivation. This the Churches do provide. As organised fellow- shins, commanding the time and loyalties of a fairly wide selection of the middle classes, they are well worth investigating, while their mem- bers—however dim they may be individually— Can be envied for their part in the fellowship and for the stability this appears to produce. The other and more important reason for this public interest in the churches lies at the heart of satire. Satire is concerned with the ex- Posing of sham means; it is only concerned with ends in so far as these are clarified and purified b y the dispersal of the rubbish around them. The Parable of this is clear. God is the end, the present activities of the churches are the means. God is good, the means are humanly fallible at worst hopelessly corrupt. They are, in fact, a legitimate and satisfactory target for satire The effect of satirising the churches (and in this Operation such items as Paul Ferris's re- cent hook on the Church of England, much of L'ellgious TV, current examinations of popular "don preachers, etc., may be included) is to Proclaim end to which the churches stand as means—and that end is God, or, in trinitarian language God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Of course, this is not the avowed aim of the satirists, except in such cases as the magazine Prism. But satire on the churches presupposes a subconscious interest in God. And this is a very different state of affairs from that of the Thirties, when the churches were the hand- maiden of the established classes, middle and upper, and the intelligentsia preferred to ignore both them and their founder.
It is their founder that about 2,000,000 people in this country will be thinking of as they make their minimum duties within the Church of England on Easter morning. And the relation- ship between their founder and God tout court is one which has always been in a state of ten- sion; a tension defined in the Athanasian creed, dismissed as polytheism by Islam, labelled trinitarian' and accepted without much thought by church-going Christians and a matter of current discussion by leading clerics making brief and rather startled appearances in the Sunday newspapers. The problem of this rela- tionship was nowhere better put than by G. K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man:
What is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word? It is that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there walked into the middle of the world the in- visible being about whom the 'thinkers make the theories and the mythologists hand down myths, the Man Who Made the World.
And he goes on: That the Creator was present at scenes a little subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with tax-collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be• firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilisation for more than a thousand years— that is something utterly unlike anything in nature.
This scandal, the 'scandal of particularity,' is not only the central teaching of Christianity but the chief reason why sensible men nowadays cannot do with the churches. The history of the last 2,000 years is studded by mankind's hope- less and often violent attempts to settle the problem, but it remains undisposed of to this day. To add a third party and create a godly triumvirate, as Christ himself did when he said that the comforter would come, might seem to add insult to injury. In fact, in a curious way, it made the tension bearable and the Christian Churches of the East have found a fulfilled religion in which the Holy Catholic Church and the Holy Ghost exist in mutual support instead of—as instanced in the Protestant-Catholic dichotomy—in mutual exclusion. Today in the Anglican churches, particularly the Provinces of York and Canterbury, the Holy Ghost seems to have been sqUeezed out altogether—so lead- ing theologians acquainted with the ethos of the Eastern Churches are convinced. And it may be the recent furore over the Bishop of Woolwich's exegesis of Bonhoeffer's thought is in fact the
Timothy is IL signal for the return of the Holy Ghost into the awareness of the Western Christian Unfortu- nately this is not yet apparent. Bonhoeffer, un- deniably amongst the great Christian martyrs of the last 250 years, did not live long enough to express a positive view of what `religionless Christianity' might be. His inspiration seems to derive mainly from the deep dissatisfaction and disgust he felt at the existing thought-forms and moral attitudes of the Christian Churches.
This dissatisfaction is fair enough, and is today shared by a large slice of the younger Anglican clergy—not, unfortunately, by many lay .people.
These clergymen are talented and dedicated people and one would feel it easier to join them if their energies did not seem to derive, like Bonhoeffer's, more from dislike of what they have come from (a narrow and reactionary clericalism set a self-evidently impossible task of evangelism) than love of what they are striving for (a new and as yet undefined fellowship of Christians).
There is also the well-known danger of sup- posing that the particular virtues or failures of a few key people are ea ipsa the virtues and failures of a whole generation—the problem of whom the philosophers are really designating when they talk about 'we.' There happen to be many fine Anglican priests who find the tradi- tional methods of prayer, worship and evan- gelism either very difficult or impossible for them; in encountering the means to change these they assume' naturally that many others are facing the same problems. But, in fact, there is some evidence to show that the volume of prayer is every bit as strong as, it ever has been in this country (not that that is cause for complacency); and that this volume of prayer comes most strongly from the well-defined evangelical or catholic parties in the Church which are so dis- liked, or whose existence is repeatedly denied, by the present advocates of Bonhoeffer.
This is not a plea to renounce liturgical or ecclesiastical experimentation; but one might suggest—and Easter is a good time to do so, the anniversary of the time when eleven frightened men hid in a room and did not be- lieve it when a reformed tart came and told them that someone had rolled away, the stone from the tomb in which their leader had been buried after his judicial execution—that the Christian Churches have a capacity for survival quite in- dependently of the often rather dismal people who belong to them. The whole story remains a scandal, the scandal of particularity. From Christmas to Easter, from Incarnation to Resur- rection, is a span of a few short years, while Tiberius was Emperor of the Roman world. But if it had not been a scandal it would not be the Christian religion and world history would have been very different. With the departure of the Second Person of the Trinity from the earthly scene and the taking over by the Third, and most unconsidered Person, Christianity becomes permanently beset by scandals, which makes its survival increasingly miraculous. The latest in time is one that has put a theological work by the Bishop of Woolwich at the top of the best-seller lists and has set going a national dialogue none the less spirited for often being totally misin- formed. Stripped to its essentials it is the Holy Ghost reannouncing its presence.
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