QUEEN Elizabeth II told the nation that the year 1992 had been for her an annus horribilis, for which the Sun newspaper offered the inspired ‘translation’:
‘Queen says it’s been a bum year!’
Marvellous invention showing that the scribblers on the tabloids are often wittier than the more upmarket scribes on the broadsheets. Why are so many who write for the posh papers such supercilious sophisticates? They forget that being sophisticated was in Socrates’s definition an insult, as the Sophists were those who peddled their supposed wisdom for filthy lucre. In my spare time I’m a bit of a sophisticates-watcher and never more gleeful than when I come across an intellectual’s gaffe. A recent poseur – among the many – in the Spectator, trying to impress us with his Kultur, wrote of ‘the hoi polloi’ and thus revealed that he didn’t know the Greek he was quoting – as ‘hoi’ means ‘the’ – and so he’d effectually written ‘the the’.
The genius of tabloid headline-writers has much in common with those old posters called Wayside Pulpit. I was once brought rudely awake by one which boasted in bright red letters:
THIS CHURCH FOR SINNERS ONLY.
Not just clever but true. There is more authentic Christianity in those five words than in many a five hours’ sermonising. The self-proclaimed devout award themselves brownie points for merely turning up at church, for gracing the place with their presence. But they don’t notice how much they resemble the hypocrites Christ dismissed as blind guides and whited sepulchres.
Others, similar, are like G K Chesterton’s grandfather, who always carried a Bible under his arm though he never went to church. When challenged, he replied: ‘I do it to set an example, Chessie!’
Which takes me back to those up-themselves intellectual journalists and sophisticates. One of these – and he is typical – wrote recently:
‘I don’t myself believe a word of the Christian faith, but I think it’s the best educational grounding for our children.’
Which is rather like the caricature Victorian snob who said that religion is just right – for the servants. In other words, not do as I do but do as I say. And that unbelieving journalist astonishingly saw nothing wrong with teaching something he thought false. The word for that is liar.
The best description of the Church of England today is a house built on sand. Its leaders trade on the beliefs and values which it no longer practises. They offer their support for Christianity, but they are too smug to believe it themselves. We have a high-profile example ready to hand. Only last week the oh-so-sensitive Prince of Wales – wails? – declared himself iffy when it comes to the reality of God, but very much attached to the church. Unfortunately, the bishops’ substitute for Christian truth is merely an agglomeration of all the fashionable postures of the secular progressives: racism, slavery, equality, diversity and climate change. They have so polluted the essence of Christianity that now they practise something like that scorned in Reinhold Niebuhr’s telling accusation:
‘A God without wrath brings men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.’
Or, as the great Karl Barth said, what we now have is ‘a pseudo-religion for sophisticated non-believers’.
Is there a remedy? Let me give you the flavour of a conversation I had with a farmer when I was a country parson in the Vale of York:
‘What do you think of God?’
‘E’s up there in’t E?’
‘And Jesus Christ?’
‘T’ Son. ’E cum darn ’ere. T’ Saviour like.’
Perhaps there were some people once who believed that God is up above the sky, but that was not what they meant by saying that God is up there. It’s not what that farmer meant either. What such people mean by saying God is up there is that God is the Creator of everything and he is in charge. God is the reality in which they believe. And by their belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and our Saviour, they recognise that there is something wrong with us that needs fixing. And that Jesus fixed it.
Jesus Christ as our Saviour is also something which the farmer takes for granted. He knows he needs the Saviour because, as he put it:
‘There’s summat the matter wi’ me!’
I echo that:
‘There’s summat the matter wi’ me an’ all!’
Technically, in the jargon, this thing that’s the matter with me is called Original Sin. Forget gardens and apples and snakes in the grass and something that gets passed on like flu. St Paul tells it as it is: ‘The thing I would not, that I do; and what I would, I do not.’
There you have it: the Christian definition of human nature in 15 words of one syllable. Even Sarah Mullally could hardly fail to understand them. St Paul does what he knows is wrong and he doesn’t do what’s right. So do I and so do you. And if we deny this, we are neurotically or psychotically deceiving ourselves and in need of help from the men – or women, of course – in white coats.
So-called Original Sin is simply the reality principle based on our own realistic, sane and indubitable experience. Bishop David Jenkins – an old friend and sparring-partner of mine – called it the buggeration factor.
(Incidentally, it was Jenkins who said that Christ’s resurrection ‘is not a conjuring trick with bones’. I shall hope to have more to say about that next week.)
In conclusion, the word God makes sense to us so long as we don’t let the theologians and the philosophers come anywhere near it. I know, because I have spent a lifetime studying philosophy and the history of theology. I know about the Graf-Wellhausen theory, the synoptic problem of the gospels’ authorship, Charles Gore’s doctrine of kenosis and Newman’s Theory of Development as well as Descartes’s Ontological Argument, Kant’s reply to it and Aquinas’s Five Ways to demonstrate the existence of God.
And a fat lot of good it has done me. But examine my own experience – what I take most seriously because it is unavoidable and so to deny it would be to contradict my own nature – and I know of God’s reality and my needs for him just as my Yorkshire farmer knew it.
As Samuel Coleridge put it in his Aids to Reflection:
‘Evidence? I am weary of evidence. Only rouse a man and make him feel the truth of his religion.’
