Giles Fraser Guardian/UK 28 July 2016
The offer of love in return for hate, even to the point of death. This is the horrendous price that peace is sometimes asked to pay.’
When I was first ordained a priest, I would say my prayers every morning in front of three undistinguished stained-glass windows. And every morning, I would argue in my head with the theology those windows were promoting. On the left, Abraham held up a curly knife, preparing to cut the throat of his son who is strapped to an altar. In the middle, Christ hanging on the cross, dripping blood. On the right, a priest, in full liturgical kit, stood behind an altar, hands outstretched over bread and wine. The coloured glass was insisting that these three scenes were intimately connected, that the mass/holy communion/eucharist, whatever you call it, is essentially a sacrifice – and not just some stylised community get-together.
As Pope John Paul II put it in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, the eucharist is “the sacrifice of the cross perpetuated down the age. This sacrifice is so decisive for the salvation of the human race that Jesus Christ … left us a means of sharing in it as if we had been present there”. Catholic Christianity, like that of temple Judaism before it, is a religion of blood and altars.
Father Jacques Hamel’s throat was slit as he said morning mass, murdered by a teenager claiming allegiance to Islamic State. The sacrificial imagery is unavoidable. And soon after his killing, #JeSuisPretre – I am a priest – began trending on social media, employing the now familiar “I am” prefix as an expression of digital solidarity with yet another victim of global terrorism. It felt unusually fitting in this instance. “I am the bread of life,” says Jesus in the first of a series of eight so-called “I am …” passages in John’s gospel. And the bread of life was precisely what Father Jacques believed himself to be distributing that morning on the outskirts of Rouen. He died, as he believed, on his knees – not in supplication to his spotty murderers, but to the author of life itself to whom he was about to return.
Rouen itself is a town soaked in the blood of martyrdom. It was here that another 19-year-old, believing herself to have received visions from God, and believing God to have called her to war, was burned at the stake by the English as a heretic. To some, Joan of Arc was a witness to the one true faith. To others she was a deluded fantasist, using God to inspire acts of violence.
It’s not just Islam that has a problem with violence. Indeed, arguably, the Bible has more violence in it that the Qur’an – though I have never thought the presence of violence in the scriptures a problem per se, because I have never read my scriptures as an instruction manual from God. More a reflection of a historic real-world human struggle for faith, in which faith is discovered. And the difference between good religion and bad religion – like the difference between good and bad people – has little to do with who is right and who is wrong about God and absolutely everything to do with how each religious tradition manages its own propensity for violence.
And it is here that the language of sacrifice is especially tricky. I have no time for the idea that Jesus is sacrificed on the cross to appease an angry God. If that’s true, then God becomes the enemy of humankind and I am against him. No, Jesus absorbs the violence that comes from us not from God. He receives our blows, our punishments, our disdain. And, despite his innocence – or, rather, precisely because of it – he refuses to answer back in kind. No more an eye for an eye.
In other words, the sacrifice of the cross is the non-violent absorption of human violence. The offer of love in return for hate, even to the point of death. This is the horrendous price that peace is sometimes asked to pay. This is what makes the eucharistic sacrifice life-giving and not some historical death cult. And this is the sacrifice that Father Jacques was celebrating as he died. He died as a priest, doing what priests do. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/jul/28/father-jacques-hamel-died-as-a-priest-doing-what-priests-do
Sunday, 31 July 2016
The Orange Man
Uri Avnery Gush Shalom 30 July 2016
SO HERE we are. Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will be our next president. "Our"? I am not a US citizen, and have no desire to be one. But I live in a world in which the USA is the sole superpower, in which every decision of the US administration has an impact on the lives of every human being.
FOR ME AS a citizen of Israel, this impact is much greater than for most and much more immediate. I just saw a cartoon showing both Trump and Hillary crawling on the ground and licking the boots of an Israeli soldier. This is not too much of an exaggeration.
Both candidates claim to be unwavering supporters of "Israel". But what does that mean? Do they support all sections of Israeli society? Certainly not. They support one certain part of Israel: the ultra-right-wing government of Binyamin Netanyahu, which is supported by the American Jewish billionaires who contribute to their coffers.
Supporting Netanyahu and his even more right-wing coalition partners means acting against me and millions of other Israelis who can see that Netanyahu is leading our state to disaster.
I have a clear interest in this election. So I want at least to express my opinion. Right at the beginning, I wrote that Donald Trump reminded me in some ways of Adolf Hitler. Now, after all the primaries and conventions, I must repeat that terrible assessment.
Of course, there are huge dissimilarities. Different times. Different countries. Different circumstances. And, first of all, different media. Hitler was a product of the radio. It was his voice, a unique instrument, that conquered the German masses. Trump is a creation of the TV era. He dominates the small screen. He beat all his rivals on TV. He will easily beat Hillary on TV. If the battle were fought only on TV, it would already have been decided for good.
THE SIMILARITY between Trump and Hitler exists on a different level. In the center of Trump's entire campaign there stands one word, indeed one letter: "I". There is no "We". No normal ideology. No real program.
It is all about "I", about Trump. Trump will come. Trump will fix everything. That was the essence of Hitlerism, too. The man had no real program. This was also true of Mussolini, Hitler's teacher in many ways, who did not know the word "we" either. The absolute centrality of the Leader is the hallmark of fascism. Trump's program is Trump.
THIS BEING so, all of Trump's declarations and policy statements are totally unimportant. Statements are made on the spur of the moment because they suit Trump at that moment. They are forgotten the next, sometimes to be replaced by the opposite. This is why it is so easy to catch Trump uttering a lie. I have seen lists of dozens of them, one more blatant than the next.
There again we have the example of Adolf Hitler. In his book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") he speaks about this openly. The book itself is quite boring, the product of a third-rate mind, but it includes several chapters about "propaganda" which are fascinating.
As a front-line soldier throughout the four years of World War I Hitler was immensely impressed by the British propaganda effort aimed at the German lines. Hitler admired the British slogans, which to him were a pack of lies. One of his conclusions was that the bigger the lie, the bigger its chances of being believed, since a simple person cannot imagine that anybody would dare to lie so much.
HILLARY CLINTON is a good, ordinary politician. You can, with fair assurance, imagine what a Hillary Clinton presidency would look like. She is dependable, predictable. More of the same, though without the charm of Barack (and Michelle!) Obama.
No one can predict a Trump presidency. Every prediction is a leap in the dark. One thing seems real: his admiration for Vladimir Putin. Though he is the very opposite of the cool, calculating, bold but cautious former KGB apparatchik, Trump seems to admire him.
There is not much evidence that the admiration is mutual, but it seems certain that today's successors of the KGB are interfering actively in the American election, doing their utmost to help Trump and sabotage Hillary.
A US-Russian rapprochement may be a good thing. The present American knee-jerk enmity towards everything Russian is a remnant of the Cold War and bad for the world at large. I don't see why the two powers cannot cooperate in many fields.
Towards the third power, China, the Trump attitude is the opposite. He wants to annul the trade agreements and bring the jobs back home. Even I, a non-economist, can see that this is nonsense.
And so forth. It's all like seeing a man about to jump from the roof out of sheer curiosity.
The Germans who voted in April 1933 for Adolf Hitler and his party did not dream about World War II, though Hitler was already resolved to conquer Eastern Europe and open it up for German colonization. They were hypnotized by Hitler's personality. I HATE the choice of the Lesser Evil. In twenty Israeli election campaigns (except the four in which I was myself a candidate) I have voted for parties I did not like very much and for candidates I did not trust at all.
But this is a fact of life. If there is no candidate you can root for, you take the one who can cause the minimum damage. In 1933 my father voted for a German conservative party, because he believed that they were the only ones who had a chance of stopping the Nazis. As Pierre Mendes-France once said: "to live is to choose".
I want to say to all my American friends: Go out and vote for Hillary, whether you like her or not. Liking does not really come into it.
Don't stay at home. Not voting means voting for Trump. Well, Hillary Clinton is not awful. She is an acceptable candidate. But compared to Donald Trump, she is an angel. [Abridged]
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1469744450
Monday, 25 July 2016
Theresa May is lying over Trident. Or at least I hope she is
Giles Fraser Guardian/UK 23 July, 2016
In one of her first acts as prime minister, Theresa May sat down to write to the commanders of our four nuclear submarines, laying out what she would like them to do in the event of a nuclear attack. These handwritten instructions are locked in the boats’ safes, only to be opened if an attack has knocked out all contact with government. No one has ever opened one.
On Wednesday night, on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, Major General Patrick Cordingley DSO, commander of the Desert Rats during the first Gulf war – so no bleeding-heart liberal – said that he thought it would be the moral duty of commanders not to fire, even if Mrs May had instructed them to do so. It was astonishing to hear a senior military figure urging fellow officers to disobey a direct order from the PM.
The general was not being squeamish – he was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq. Rather, he was making the point that if Britain had been the victim of a nuclear attack, then the game was already up and there would be little left for us to defend. Firing in such circumstances would be tactically pointless. Indeed, it would be murderous revenge, nothing more. And who wants their last action on earth to be one of mass genocide?
Speaking in the House of Commons during the Trident debate, Mrs May said she was perfectly prepared to order her commanders to fire. She has to say that, of course. There’s no point in having a deterrent if the PM indicates in advance that she wouldn’t use it. Even so, locked inside those safes, what the top-secret letters actually say is a totally different matter. Remember, the only reason to open them would be if deterrence had failed. And there would be absolutely no point in firing. In other words, given her commitment to the idea of deterrence, the only moral thing would be for Mrs May to tell the world she has written “fire” when, in fact, she has written something else entirely. And that, we might reasonably suppose from subsequent comments, is precisely what Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher did. It should come as no surprise: this is poker and everybody lies.
So parliament has just committed well over £100bn on a weapons system that we won’t use, that we mustn’t use, and that even the Russians know we won’t use. They know this because the only situation in which we would think about pressing the button would be precisely the situation in which there was no longer any point in pressing the button.
Tories voted for Trident out of some backward sense of patriotism, still pretending the UK is a big player in the politics of global power, and New Labour voted for it as an act of non-virtue signalling, still deliberately distancing themselves from the electoral kryptonite of those pacifist hippies of the 1970s.
The old argument for nuclear weapons during the cold war was simple. We didn’t have the conventional forces to resist the Russians if they drove their tanks into Germany. If they invaded, we could only stop them with tactical nuclear weapons. This nuclear option was primarily envisaged as a first-strike option. But does anyone seriously imagine that we would do the same today if the Russians invaded Latvia? MPs are still going on about a deterrent even though any plausible scenario for this to be employed has disappeared. Deterrent is an empty threat, a retro tactical theory, marooned by totally different geopolitical circumstances.
Sitting opposite General Cordingley in the Moral Maze studio was Michael Portillo, who used to be the hawkish secretary of state for defence before he retired to play with his trains. Like Cordingley, he too is against the renewal of Trident, seeing our few hundred or so nuclear warheads as irrelevant in a world in which the Russians and the US have several thousand nukes each. The world has changed since the cold war, but too consumed with internal politics, the House of Commons has failed to notice. [Abbrev]
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/jul/21/theresa-may-is-lying-over-trident-or-at-least-i-hope-she-is#img-1@giles_fraser
In one of her first acts as prime minister, Theresa May sat down to write to the commanders of our four nuclear submarines, laying out what she would like them to do in the event of a nuclear attack. These handwritten instructions are locked in the boats’ safes, only to be opened if an attack has knocked out all contact with government. No one has ever opened one.
On Wednesday night, on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, Major General Patrick Cordingley DSO, commander of the Desert Rats during the first Gulf war – so no bleeding-heart liberal – said that he thought it would be the moral duty of commanders not to fire, even if Mrs May had instructed them to do so. It was astonishing to hear a senior military figure urging fellow officers to disobey a direct order from the PM.
The general was not being squeamish – he was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq. Rather, he was making the point that if Britain had been the victim of a nuclear attack, then the game was already up and there would be little left for us to defend. Firing in such circumstances would be tactically pointless. Indeed, it would be murderous revenge, nothing more. And who wants their last action on earth to be one of mass genocide?
Speaking in the House of Commons during the Trident debate, Mrs May said she was perfectly prepared to order her commanders to fire. She has to say that, of course. There’s no point in having a deterrent if the PM indicates in advance that she wouldn’t use it. Even so, locked inside those safes, what the top-secret letters actually say is a totally different matter. Remember, the only reason to open them would be if deterrence had failed. And there would be absolutely no point in firing. In other words, given her commitment to the idea of deterrence, the only moral thing would be for Mrs May to tell the world she has written “fire” when, in fact, she has written something else entirely. And that, we might reasonably suppose from subsequent comments, is precisely what Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher did. It should come as no surprise: this is poker and everybody lies.
So parliament has just committed well over £100bn on a weapons system that we won’t use, that we mustn’t use, and that even the Russians know we won’t use. They know this because the only situation in which we would think about pressing the button would be precisely the situation in which there was no longer any point in pressing the button.
Tories voted for Trident out of some backward sense of patriotism, still pretending the UK is a big player in the politics of global power, and New Labour voted for it as an act of non-virtue signalling, still deliberately distancing themselves from the electoral kryptonite of those pacifist hippies of the 1970s.
The old argument for nuclear weapons during the cold war was simple. We didn’t have the conventional forces to resist the Russians if they drove their tanks into Germany. If they invaded, we could only stop them with tactical nuclear weapons. This nuclear option was primarily envisaged as a first-strike option. But does anyone seriously imagine that we would do the same today if the Russians invaded Latvia? MPs are still going on about a deterrent even though any plausible scenario for this to be employed has disappeared. Deterrent is an empty threat, a retro tactical theory, marooned by totally different geopolitical circumstances.
Sitting opposite General Cordingley in the Moral Maze studio was Michael Portillo, who used to be the hawkish secretary of state for defence before he retired to play with his trains. Like Cordingley, he too is against the renewal of Trident, seeing our few hundred or so nuclear warheads as irrelevant in a world in which the Russians and the US have several thousand nukes each. The world has changed since the cold war, but too consumed with internal politics, the House of Commons has failed to notice. [Abbrev]
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/jul/21/theresa-may-is-lying-over-trident-or-at-least-i-hope-she-is#img-1@giles_fraser
Response to the Nice Attack
By
Robert
Fisk @indyvoices Independent/UK 16 July 2016
The act was obscene. President Hollande’s description – “monstrous” – was adequate so far as it went, but created the old problem. What happens when three or four hundred innocents are killed by a murderer? Or five hundred? Does that become “really monstrous” or “very monstrous indeed”? But the political reaction to this crime against humanity in Nice was mundane to the point of lunacy. Hollande announced that France would “reinforce our action in Syria and Iraq.”
Sure, I get the point. If Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel of Tunisia had anything to do with Isis or Nusrah (and when he spoke, Hollande would not have known if this was true), then firing more French missiles into the burned sands of Mesopotamia or the desert around Raqqa in the hope of striking Isis would have no effect other than to reinforce the old “feel good” factor of biffing “world terror” for the sake of it.
Tunisia, of course, is well over a thousand miles from Syria, let alone Iraq, but one bunch of murderous Arabs is much like another to our foreign ministries and if Bouhlel turns out to have “Isis roots” – no matter how self-declared – then the bigger the bombs the better.
Everyone who dares to point this out – and European leaders are always threatening Isis, just as Isis is always threatening the West – is immediately cast out of society as a “friend of terrorists”. There is, in fact, a whole vocabulary of abuse for anyone who says that there are reasons for these acts of mass murder which we need to know, however crazed they are. At present, the Isis/Western hate mail to each other is almost identical with King Lear: “I will do such things…what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth…”
Of course, I fear we are going in the coming hours to be inundated with painful repetitions of atrocities past: relatives who had "no idea" their son/brother/nephew/uncle might be a violent killer, neighbours who will attest that the attacker was always a quiet man (who probably “kept himself to himself”, as they say), Muslims who will again insist on the peacefulness of their religion. In addition to this, we will have politicians who will promise to stamp out “terror” and cops who will praise their brothers-in-arms for their courage.
And we will forget France’s fraught colonial history in Algeria and Tunisia, the 125th anniversary of its Tunisian “protectorate” this year – and the 70th anniversary of Tunisia’s independence – and the Islamist presence that has grown frighteningly within the body politic of Tunisia since the 2011 revolution. It is no good holding up this painful history as some sort of excuse or “root cause” of the mass murders in Nice. But at some point, we in the West are going to have to learn that if we intervene militarily in Mali or Iraq or Libya or Syria or interfere in Turkey, or Egypt, or the Gulf, or the Maghreb – then we will not be safe “at home”.
It’s an old story now. In the past, we could go on foreign adventures in Korea or Vietnam without worrying that North Koreans would blow up the London Underground or that the Vietcong would attack New York with airliners. Not anymore. Foreign adventures come at a terrifying cost. Claiming they do not – or pompously declaring that “their” bombs in London or Paris have nothing to do with “our” bombs in Iraq – is dishonest.
Sure, I get the point. If Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel of Tunisia had anything to do with Isis or Nusrah (and when he spoke, Hollande would not have known if this was true), then firing more French missiles into the burned sands of Mesopotamia or the desert around Raqqa in the hope of striking Isis would have no effect other than to reinforce the old “feel good” factor of biffing “world terror” for the sake of it.
Tunisia, of course, is well over a thousand miles from Syria, let alone Iraq, but one bunch of murderous Arabs is much like another to our foreign ministries and if Bouhlel turns out to have “Isis roots” – no matter how self-declared – then the bigger the bombs the better.
Everyone who dares to point this out – and European leaders are always threatening Isis, just as Isis is always threatening the West – is immediately cast out of society as a “friend of terrorists”. There is, in fact, a whole vocabulary of abuse for anyone who says that there are reasons for these acts of mass murder which we need to know, however crazed they are. At present, the Isis/Western hate mail to each other is almost identical with King Lear: “I will do such things…what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth…”
Of course, I fear we are going in the coming hours to be inundated with painful repetitions of atrocities past: relatives who had "no idea" their son/brother/nephew/uncle might be a violent killer, neighbours who will attest that the attacker was always a quiet man (who probably “kept himself to himself”, as they say), Muslims who will again insist on the peacefulness of their religion. In addition to this, we will have politicians who will promise to stamp out “terror” and cops who will praise their brothers-in-arms for their courage.
And we will forget France’s fraught colonial history in Algeria and Tunisia, the 125th anniversary of its Tunisian “protectorate” this year – and the 70th anniversary of Tunisia’s independence – and the Islamist presence that has grown frighteningly within the body politic of Tunisia since the 2011 revolution. It is no good holding up this painful history as some sort of excuse or “root cause” of the mass murders in Nice. But at some point, we in the West are going to have to learn that if we intervene militarily in Mali or Iraq or Libya or Syria or interfere in Turkey, or Egypt, or the Gulf, or the Maghreb – then we will not be safe “at home”.
It’s an old story now. In the past, we could go on foreign adventures in Korea or Vietnam without worrying that North Koreans would blow up the London Underground or that the Vietcong would attack New York with airliners. Not anymore. Foreign adventures come at a terrifying cost. Claiming they do not – or pompously declaring that “their” bombs in London or Paris have nothing to do with “our” bombs in Iraq – is dishonest.
At some point in history – though how far into the future, when we will have cut away the foundations of our own freedoms with our own new laws – we will probably have to re-think our relationship with the Middle East and with history. Yes, and with religion.
A BBC reporter was drawing parallels yesterday with the car-ramming Palestinians who have killed Israelis. But the last phone-video I saw which had any parallel of scale with Nice was a horrifying piece of footage during the Egyptian revolution of 2011 when an Egyptian army truck was driven at speed – and swerving wildly – into a crowd of peaceful protestors. Why didn’t we remember that after Nice? Because the killers were never caught? Because no-one remembers yesterday’s news? Or because the victims were Arabs involved in a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know – by and large -- nothing. [Abbrev]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nice-terrorist-attack-france-isis-francois-hollande-response-syria-iraq-military-bombs-vicious-a7139101.htmlT
A BBC reporter was drawing parallels yesterday with the car-ramming Palestinians who have killed Israelis. But the last phone-video I saw which had any parallel of scale with Nice was a horrifying piece of footage during the Egyptian revolution of 2011 when an Egyptian army truck was driven at speed – and swerving wildly – into a crowd of peaceful protestors. Why didn’t we remember that after Nice? Because the killers were never caught? Because no-one remembers yesterday’s news? Or because the victims were Arabs involved in a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know – by and large -- nothing. [Abbrev]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nice-terrorist-attack-france-isis-francois-hollande-response-syria-iraq-military-bombs-vicious-a7139101.htmlT
Tuesday, 19 July 2016
Ian Harris on loyalty
Otago Daily Times July 8 2016
In a time of transition, is the timidity of the clergy killing the church? asks Ian Harris. Where does loyalty lie?
Why do so many ministers, retiring after a lifetime of service to their church, hardly ever go to church again? Not, usually, because they’ve lost their faith. Rather, they’ve come to feel out of sync with what they see happening there. Many lay people feel the same way. After loyally playing their part for years in parish life, they wake up one morning and ask themselves: “What exactly am I being loyal to? The church as an institution? A denominational heritage? A family tradition? The people of my parish? The minister or priest? The example of Jesus? Christ of the creeds?”
All these are worthy, but there’s a deep-down dissonance. The pieces don’t fit together as neatly as before. They don’t find church-going the energising, focusing, deepening experience it used to be. They hang on by their fingernails as long as they can . . . and then drop out. This malaise has been happening across denominations for decades, with Auckland Catholic Bishop Patrick Dunn last month highlighting the steady defection of New Zealand-born Christians as the “Kiwi drift”.
One used to hear people say they were subjected to so much religion while growing up that they were happy to break free of it as soon as they could. Winston Churchill was one such. He tells how at Harrow he attended three services every Sunday, plus morning and evening prayers through the week: “I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Bank of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.”
That is not happening so much today, simply because so many parents decide not to introduce their children to church at all. Perhaps a reaction will set in one day when, as adults, a curious new generation begins to wonder what they have been deprived of. And perhaps not.
One major reason for the “Kiwi drift” is the churches’ failure to allow Christian faith to evolve in a changing world. They have clung to creeds, doctrines and practices that made excellent sense in light of the knowledge of former times, but which are crying out for a thorough-going re-interpretation in our 21st-century world.
I have had many letters reflecting that. After lifelong membership in her church, one woman writes: “What a pity the churches have kept silent and denied Christian people access to the thinking of modern scholarship. And how much pain its devotees could be spared as they are left to ponder their own apparently heretical views.”
Another, in her 80s and still attending church: “My faith journey has brought me to a place of questioning the dogma of the church . . . Sometimes it seems as though my efforts at finding a meaningful belief put me out on a limb, but now I realise that I am not alone.”
Their comments echo the views of ministers whose reading and thinking have taken them far from the point where their journey began. Together they are part of a far-reaching transition that is occurring within Christian thought, but not so much in regular church life – often the reverse as leaders dig in to resist substantive change.
Sometimes it is clergy who hold the church back. At the Napier Progressive Spirituality Conference in May, American United Church of Christ pastor Dr Robin Meyers declared bluntly: “The timidity of the clergy is killing the church.” Usually it is pastoral concern that deters them from offering contemporary insights on the Bible and faith, even when they would like to. But silence leaves people who would be open to such insights in limbo.
Sometimes it is lay people who block progressive alternatives, believing any change to ancient formulations would be a sell-out. There could be some truth in the prediction that the last seven words of the church will be: “We’ve never done it like that before.”
For me, the future of Christian faith does not depend on loyally keeping fossils warm, whether fossils of creed, doctrine, church order, or anything else. It hinges rather on identifying what is core to our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and then working out how people at home in the modern world can relate to it and express it honestly in terms of today. Which happens to be just what Christians of the 4th, 12th, 16th and other centuries did in and for their own times.
That would unquestionably be loyalty – but loyalty to the Judaeo-Christian core and the quintessential religious process, rather than to interpretations which, in our secular understanding, are no longer tenable.
Let the transition roll on!
In a time of transition, is the timidity of the clergy killing the church? asks Ian Harris. Where does loyalty lie?
Why do so many ministers, retiring after a lifetime of service to their church, hardly ever go to church again? Not, usually, because they’ve lost their faith. Rather, they’ve come to feel out of sync with what they see happening there. Many lay people feel the same way. After loyally playing their part for years in parish life, they wake up one morning and ask themselves: “What exactly am I being loyal to? The church as an institution? A denominational heritage? A family tradition? The people of my parish? The minister or priest? The example of Jesus? Christ of the creeds?”
All these are worthy, but there’s a deep-down dissonance. The pieces don’t fit together as neatly as before. They don’t find church-going the energising, focusing, deepening experience it used to be. They hang on by their fingernails as long as they can . . . and then drop out. This malaise has been happening across denominations for decades, with Auckland Catholic Bishop Patrick Dunn last month highlighting the steady defection of New Zealand-born Christians as the “Kiwi drift”.
One used to hear people say they were subjected to so much religion while growing up that they were happy to break free of it as soon as they could. Winston Churchill was one such. He tells how at Harrow he attended three services every Sunday, plus morning and evening prayers through the week: “I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Bank of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.”
That is not happening so much today, simply because so many parents decide not to introduce their children to church at all. Perhaps a reaction will set in one day when, as adults, a curious new generation begins to wonder what they have been deprived of. And perhaps not.
One major reason for the “Kiwi drift” is the churches’ failure to allow Christian faith to evolve in a changing world. They have clung to creeds, doctrines and practices that made excellent sense in light of the knowledge of former times, but which are crying out for a thorough-going re-interpretation in our 21st-century world.
I have had many letters reflecting that. After lifelong membership in her church, one woman writes: “What a pity the churches have kept silent and denied Christian people access to the thinking of modern scholarship. And how much pain its devotees could be spared as they are left to ponder their own apparently heretical views.”
Another, in her 80s and still attending church: “My faith journey has brought me to a place of questioning the dogma of the church . . . Sometimes it seems as though my efforts at finding a meaningful belief put me out on a limb, but now I realise that I am not alone.”
Their comments echo the views of ministers whose reading and thinking have taken them far from the point where their journey began. Together they are part of a far-reaching transition that is occurring within Christian thought, but not so much in regular church life – often the reverse as leaders dig in to resist substantive change.
Sometimes it is clergy who hold the church back. At the Napier Progressive Spirituality Conference in May, American United Church of Christ pastor Dr Robin Meyers declared bluntly: “The timidity of the clergy is killing the church.” Usually it is pastoral concern that deters them from offering contemporary insights on the Bible and faith, even when they would like to. But silence leaves people who would be open to such insights in limbo.
Sometimes it is lay people who block progressive alternatives, believing any change to ancient formulations would be a sell-out. There could be some truth in the prediction that the last seven words of the church will be: “We’ve never done it like that before.”
For me, the future of Christian faith does not depend on loyally keeping fossils warm, whether fossils of creed, doctrine, church order, or anything else. It hinges rather on identifying what is core to our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and then working out how people at home in the modern world can relate to it and express it honestly in terms of today. Which happens to be just what Christians of the 4th, 12th, 16th and other centuries did in and for their own times.
That would unquestionably be loyalty – but loyalty to the Judaeo-Christian core and the quintessential religious process, rather than to interpretations which, in our secular understanding, are no longer tenable.
Let the transition roll on!
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