Church, change and decay
Sir: How wholeheartedly I agree with your correspondent, Mrs Pamela Matthews, when she writes sadly (Letters, 4 October) that the case for moral leadership by the Church of ngland appears to many to be going by default. And, as if in demonstration of the oint, it has been left to Cardinal Heenan lone among responsible church leaders to ake a sane, Christian stand on the matter 'f the publication of the Christine Keeler memoirs'.
Angus Maude, writing several months ago n the SPECTATOR, referred to the paralysis f purpose and the stultifying confusion of nds and means which characterise the cur- ent behaviour of the church. 'The Church f England,' he wrote, 'is desperately worried as well it may be—by the size of its con- regations. Unwilling to accept the role of missionary church in a heathen country, it s trying to attract people by compromise.' Compromise, on a pastoral level, involves s in the continued acquiescence in the estab- shment of the church, with all the obliga- ons. attached thereto, even though the ituation no longer warrants it. Thus, almost II corners can demand of me that I baptise eir babies, marry their young people and rY their dead—while no corresponding emand is made on their commitment to the th. Yet the church exists to bring salvation
to all men—to bring them forgiveness and life, and to incorporate them into its wor- shipping fellowship. And I do not believe that indiscriminate baptising, marrying and burying do anything at all to forward that purpose ; indeed, it hinders it greatly, by weakening the church's membership with those whose commitment is negligible or non-existent, while at the same time giving them a false sense of spiritual security.
Intellectually, the current demand is for compromise with secular and humanist thought. Yet such compromise does no justice to the Christian understanding of the nature of man or of existence as a whole ; and it ignores or misunderstands the whole perspective of supernatural reality. Mrs Matthews's letter points to the resulting moral confusion.
But the Christian faith has nothing to do with compromise: it is concerned with con- trasts, the contrasts between life and death, between light and darkness, between good and evil. The preaching of our Blessed Lord was always the preaching of crisis and of the starkness of the choice which perpetually faces man. It had nothing to do with per- missiveness or with the saccharine sentiment of 'You're nearer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth'.
'There is no salvation outside the Church' is a hard saying, against which many have rebelled down the centuries. Yet it sums up the incontrovertible Christian truth that the way to salvation, which is God's great pur- pose for us, lies in irrevocable commitment to the life of the Body of Christ which is the fellowship of the redeemed—redeemed through baptism into His death and resur- rection, indwelt by His Holy Spirit, and united to Him through the everlasting mys- teries of His Body and Blood. Unless the Church of England is prepared to say so, without any ifs and buts, its liquidation is an urgent priority.
Allan R. G. Hawkins St George's House, 32 Cuttys Lane, Stevenage, Herts
Sir: Mrs Pamela Matthews's letter is indeed cogent, and could have used plainer language still. It is certainly a bitter disappointment that leaders of the churches, with the honour- able exception of the Roman, seem not only completely silent where denunciation and defence (particularly of the young, aban- doned e.g. to various squalid and indecent forms of publicity) are concerned, but, as Mrs Matthews mentions, actually encourag- ing some of the more contemptible and cor- rupting malpractices. A just comment would seem to be that where there are no convictions you cannot have the courage of them. Among the worst of all the offending there seems to me to stand out the condonation and even approval of such works as Honest to God, which go far to destroy the faith of the simple (who comprise, perhaps, the best human qualities of all 'in the sight of God'). To destroy the value of the Bible for these seems to me indeed deadly sin. A formed, authoritative framework for belief, and for a noble design for living, factually inerrant or not, is a necessity for multitudes ; the bean needs a stick to climb by : to cut it down is a deadly offence, possible only to unpastoral thoughtlessness.
The Christian cause today is upheld, it seems to me, by dispersed handfuls of the faithful, mostly manifested in church con- gregations in town and country. It is these in particular who express, wordlessly, those cardinal truths which are the most essential
to redeploy e.g. most people and peoples, in all recorded time, have felt that there is God, however undefined, and have wor- shipped, somehow, even though it be 'the unknown God' ; it is, in a word, quite im- possible that they should he wrong ; it is not a matter of reasoning, arguing, debating, proving, as the clever-hut-not-wise seem to assume, but of instinct, intuition. feeling; if the untold multitudes of believers are wrong there, they are wrong along all.the ranges of life; we know, however imprecisely in detail, what lies behind our worship and church- going ; let our leaders default as they will, they or their successors will return, mean- while we carry on. Among all these refuters of defection women seem to me predominant, the real preservers, once more, of the indes- tructible Church.
D. G. Davies 49 Trinity Church Square, London SEi
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