Heretics all
A. N. Wilson
Priestland's Progress: One man's search for Christianity Now Gerald Priestland (BBC pp. 224, 0.50) Ne lisez jamais les journaux religieux was the wise counsel of Lacordaire to one of his penitents. Golgotha is as far as possible from the Street of Shame. The techniques of journalism will inevitably trivialise the mysteries of the faith.
Take, for example, the journalistic cliché: or does it? You have some perfectly boring or indisputable sentence, and you want to make it more exciting for the readers. Friday follows Thursday. Or does it? The Prime Minister does a U-Turn: or does she? To find out, buy next week's issue. Religious truth does not lend itself to this sort of newsy treatment. One is reminded of the Tennysons' housekeeper who, when asked for news from Mablethorpe, replied, 'News, sir, there is none, save that Good News which we all know: that Christ Jesus died to save sinners'.
But the BBC religious affairs correspondent is a very good journalist. Jesus Saves — Or Does He? is the title of the fifth chapter of Priestland's Progress. The book is a journalistic ramble through the central paths of theology. Most people will have heard the contents when they were given as a series of broadcasts with the same title. And they will have formed their own impressions. I enjoyed the wireless programmes and I was glad to be able to read them at leisure in book form. Priestland's Progress as such does not really interest me: how the infant Priestland moved from a simple Anglican terror of hell, via a flirtation with Presbyterianism, the inevitable agnosticism and nervous breakdown, towards membership of the Society of Friends. He is an amiable cove, but, when talking about himself, rather a bore. What he is very good at indeed is journalism. I do not value the book as an Apologia, still less as a sort of interdenominational Summa with the BBC's Nihil Obstat. But it is a fascinating record of what has happened to Christianity. For, in the course of his Progress, he interviews and quotes an enormous variety of professing Christians, and it is extraordinary to see how they have changed.
Almost the only people that the Tennysons' housekeeper would have recognised as Christians at all are the Russian Orthodox like Archbishop Anthony Bloom, and the Conservative Evangelical Anglicans such as Canon Michael Green. They are people who believe their religion to be measurably and actually true. They have little in common with honest doubters like Father Harry Williams, of the Mirfield community.
'I find God very much now in the songs of Noel Coward', he avers. "I'll follow my secret heart", "Some day I'll find you" ' . . . . One wonders if he ever will. It appears that he does not believe the life and death of Christ have any material or historical significance. 'I don't see any metaphysical transaction with God which somehow changes our status towards him. It seems to me the status of human beings with God must be the same before and after Jesus'. That is the same as saying that He died completely in vain.
One would not wish to attack Father Williams. It is well-known that he is an extremely nice man, a friend of the Prince of Wales, and so on. But there seems something paradoxical that a monk should be more consoled by the ditties of a homosexual crooner than by the Passion of his Saviour. I use the example (there are hundreds in the book) to point to the extraordinary pair of facts which Priestland patiently and cleverly uncovers.
The first is, that Christianity is flourishing in a way which, in the 1960s, nobody could have predicted. 'As many people patronise the churches of Britain as the football grounds', he says. I do not know whether that is a lot or a little. But it is probably more than you would think.
But the second fact is that the Christianity which flourishes now is utterly different from the brand which most of us were brought up on. In the old days, Christians believed that the Church was founded by Christ, and they only tolerated its corruptions and idiocies because of this sacred, but also historical, fact. Nowadays, the more pious they are, the more they wish to disclaim certainties. The Body of Christ was how St Paul defined the Church. Modern Christians are happier with new metaphors. 'The Church is rather like a compost heap,' says Professor Handy of Windsor. 'Now the whole point about a compost heap is that after due process of maturing, it should be spread around'.
One could unkindly add that another more obvious point about a compost heap is that it stinks. The modern church doesn't smell of anything, though. The idea that sin is positively dangerous — that we might burn in hell for it — is dismissed as psychologically damaging. 'Jesus was the first psychiatrist', says one of Priestland's interviewees. And even the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster is not over-anxious about his own frailty'. It is fashionable to sneer at him, but he comes over, like everyone else in the book, as extremely nice. But what if he is wrong? That chilling question remained at the back of my mind as I read on. Christ said that the poor were blessed. Lord Soper, for the best reasons, says that 'Poverty is a crime' and we ought to stamp it out. Christ said that we should ask for things in prayer and they would be granted. Dom Edmund Jones finds it 'most difficult to justify interceding with God for various requests'. They all want to make Christianity nicerithan it really is.
Again and again, I was troubled; not because I disagreed with the things all these nice men and women were saying, but because it was all so much at variance with the orthodoxies of the past. Nor is that past all that distant, though Priestland speaks as if any of the things which would have seemed true to the Tennysons' housekeeper — or, indeed, to most Christians until 1960 — were `mediaeval'. 'Throughout the Middle Ages scholars tended to look back with some awe to the giants of classical Greece and Rome', Priestland writes, as though nobody has read Virgil since the reign of Innocent III. Perhaps he thinks they have not. His idea of the Middle Ages is hazy if he believes that the services at St George's Windsor have not changed much since 1348. But there is a slightly frightening element of Newspeak hidden behind his use of the word 'mediaeval'. 'Man was incapable of changing for the better, save for grace received through baptism and a life of repentance' he writes, describing this belief of 'mediaeval Catholics'. I know that I ant not the last 'mediaeval Catholic' left in England to cling to this quaint old view; a few Presbyterians apparently think it, and the bearded prelates of the orient, and some Evangelicals. But if it is true, I wonder if our pastors are behaving responsibly when they so blandly discard the very core of human consolation: the doctrine of Hell, and the doctrine of Redemption.
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