Justluckie

Belief and the Body

Faith is not an idea. It is not a proposition and it is not simply a weak form of knowledge. Indeed, it seems that the whole process of believing has more to do with our bodies than our thoughts, or at least as much to do with our bodies as anything else. Graham Ward has written a fascinating and eclectic book called 'Unbelievable' which explores the nature of belief which draws heavily on biological sciences to show that there is a process of 'tending' or 'disposition' that exists even at the level of a single cell. At the level of a whole human person, this sense of a tendency or orientation is a much better place to start when considering the matter of belief than the realm of ideas. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing had a lovely phrase for this - 'a naked intent reaching out towards God' - and I think this is close to what Ward is seeking to express in his rethinking of the nature of belief.

Belief inhabits an area of 'knowing' that is much 'lower' than that of rational thought. It is shaped not so much by argumentation as by somatic practices and ritual, by sensory awareness cultivated through repeated exposure to formative (probably communal) behaviours. This is why believing can be frustratingly persistent to those who would like to argue it out of existence. It also indicates how beliefs get changed - through willed repetition rather than through knock-down arguments. I wonder if that is also, then, how beliefs get lost - not by suddenly realising our past gullibility but by a gradual reshaping through contrary practices. Belief lives in the gut as much as in the head.

I generally agree with this picture though there is also room, as Ward suggests, for a complementary process of more sudden and uncultivated changes in perception. In Zen Buddhism, there is certainly a division between those who emphasise a gradual enlightenment which comes through regular, disciplined meditation over a long period, and those who emphasise a sudden enlightenment which may come as a flash of insight when a koan is 'solved'. In Christian terms, especially for those with a Reformation heritage, the infusion of grace is that which alters a person's fundamental disposition, though even in these traditions there is a recognition of the formation of a person into their new reality over time after this external event.

I can't hope to do more than scratch the surface of Ward's comprehensive and sophisticated explorations in a short post, and I want to do a lot more reflecting on his ideas, but I am glad that he has begun to shift the focus of our conisderation of belief and I am glad that he is doing so in dialogue with the latest scientific insights. One area I want to think more about is how this understanding of belief can shed light on the practice of meditation, which does not rely on rational thought but on a widening of our awareness. I think I know instinctively that sitting in awakened silence deepens faith, and I think that Graham Ward has given me a way of describing how that might be so.

 

Is The Bible a Good Introduction to Christianity?

I'm reading a lot about Buddhism at the moment as part of a research project and, as a relative novice, it's always tempting to find that single source of all wisdom that will tell you all you need to know. Coming from a Christian background, one might think that the best place to start would be a definitive source text, a scripture that would set out all the basics. This is folly! Buddhism does not really work like that and, although many strands of Buddhism place great emphasis on knowledge of the canons of scripture and other historic writings, Buddhism does not have 'a bible' that is the one source of all doctrine. I've written before about the triple jewel - the three refuges of the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha which give a clue about the interacting aspects of the religion that must be held in constant dialogue.

But what about the Bible? Does the Bible really offer something different from this, an authoritative, comprehensive and comphrehensible source of all you need to know about Christianity? No, I don't think it does. If someone comes to me and asks, as they sometimes do, for a good place to start in getting to understand Christianity, a single text book they can read to tell them all they need to know, I struggle to know what to give them. The last thing I would do is give them a Bible to take away and read!

For a start, they might make the (very common) mistake of thinking that it all has equal weight. It does not. One's knowledge of the real nature of Christianity will not be greatly enhanced by a close reading of Leviticus and if you get too hung up on the Apocalypse or the more outre parts of Zechariah or Daniel, you might well give up before you've really begun. Even the parts that we might think to be closer to the heart of its message can be taxing if you don't know the background - you might lose the will to live in trying to figure out the more intricate parts of the rhetoric of Romans or Hebrews and even parts of the Gospels, which are the nearest thing I would offer as the key to understanding the whole lot, are not unambiguous.

They might also misunderstand the nature of the book itself. It belongs to a community who have read it and interpreted it over many centuries and if you read it outside that community, you will only pick up a part of its importance and meaning. This community has reflected on, sifted, inculturated and, most importantly, prayed with these words and if you short-circuit that process by ignoring the accumulated wisdom on how to read this text, you will not be reading the Christian Bible.

I frequently hear people writing off Christianity by finding a text that 'tells us to go and slaughter our enemies'. Well it doesn't tell me to do that. I really mean that and I'm not just playing games with language. The Bible does not tell us to do stuff. It is read as part of a process of discernment that has at its very core the commitment to love God and neighbour, to forgive and be forgiven, to be an agent of healing and peace, to live a life marked by simplicity, joy and service and, most fundamentally, to engage with the self-giving life of Jesus. If our reading of a text from the Bible contradicts that core, we must find a way of reading it differently. It should not surprise us that a text of human creation contains elements that are contradictory. Contradiction is an inevitable part of being human. What counts is to know what is the heart of the matter. The Bible might help us do that to some extent, but it will only do that if we know where to look and how to read.

So if someone asks me for a place to begin to understand Christianity, I might offer them a book like Rowan Williams' Tokens of Trust, but I am most likely to do what Jesus did and issue an invitation to 'come and see'. You will only understand Christianity if you engage with the Christian community over time. And you won't reach that understanding through thought alone. To know Christianity is, first and foremost, to pray. If you say, I will only pray once I've been convinced about the knowing, I would gently suggest that this is the wrong way round. Give it a go and see what happens. Enter the stillness and mystery of Life and see if that does not begin to do something to your knowing.

The Problem With Sin...

One of the many ways in which Christianity is perceived as unhelpful is that it appears to be mostly concerned with people's wrongdoings. If priests are not busy harranguing others for their moral failings, then they are doing all they can to hush up their own. Of course, I think this is a deeply unfair caricature, but it has some basis in truth. Traditionally, the problem Christianity poses is that of sin - human beings need to be saved from their inbuilt tendency to do the wrong thing and from the punishment they deserve as a result. One version of the solution to this problem sees the life, death and resurrection of Jesus solely in these terms. His death is a sort of legal fix to this problem - he takes on the punishment so we don't have to, as long as we assent to this arrangement.

Some traditional Christian liturgies, especially in the West, seem to underline this paradigm with a strong emphasis on the unworthiness of the worshipper and on their dependence on the 'satisfaction' provided by Jesus' sacrifice.

To many modern ears, this whole construct is problematic. First of all, many people don't feel that sinful. They haven't done all that much that is so terribly wrong and don't like to be reminded of the occasions when they do slip up - they have enough conscience to beat themselves up about those without any external reinforcement. Secondly, they are repelled by the kind of moral duplicity that can result from such an emphasis. If the church focuses on sin, then it risks setting itself up as a moral exemplar and we all know the problems that can bring. Thirdly, it can leave people feeling no better about their real predicament, which is how to find peace and wholeness. If they didn't agree with the premise to start with, the solution will offer little solace.

I suspect that this particular angle on Christianity is one of the reasons that Buddhism can seem so attractive: no angry deity to appease, no rule-bound moralising and a very practical approach to overcoming suffering and finding that peace. Buddhism doesn't begin with the premise of our failure but of our suffering and solution is not chastisement but awakening.

I wonder if there is, in fact, a way of tellling the Christian story that comes much closer to this. This morning, the Psalm in our Episcopal office book had this line: 'For innumerable troubles have crowded upon me; my sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see' (Ps 40:13a). This little verse seems to parallel sin and misfortune and this is quite normal in Hebrew - the word for 'evil', as to some extent it is in English, means both calamity and moral failing. Leaving aside the moral aspect for a moment, we could paraphrase the thrust of this verse as 'I am so beset with suffering that I cannot see anything clearly.' This is getting closer to the Buddhist insight that we do see clearly on account of our attachments, which leads to our suffering. We begin to see clearly not by self-rebuke, but by waking up.

Thomas Merton, who knew Buddhism fairly well, came close to this emphasis. I have been struck by the number of times his later journal entries speak, above all, of finding 'clarity'. What he needs is not a proper sense of his badness (and there were many who would have gladly helped him achieve that!) but clear sight. His sufferings as a result of the tangle he found himself in after falling in love with a young nurse underlined the need for clarity above all things. It was simplicity found in solitude and meditation that would help him through the tangle towards the wholeness he sought for himself and others.

The life and teaching of Jesus can also be read as being directed towards the gift of clear sight. John's Gospel is full of examples of this metaphor but the synoptic parables can also be read in this way (wise virgins keeping awake at the wedding feast, the lamp set on a hill, the householder keeping alert in case a thief should come, the eye is the lamp of the body, seeing a bush in a mere seed etc). And I think the death and resurrection can also be seen in this light. Instead of a judicial process, this is a moment of supreme enlightenment - suffering and death are overcome not by punishment but by self-giving, by letting go of all notions of revenge, by complete and unreserved compassion, by the kind of relinquishing that appears first like abandonment ('why have you forsaken me?') and then like wholeness ('it is completed'). The resurrection is a life thus renewed and lived in the light. It is the dawning of the light in the place where darkness appeared to have won its final victory.

To shift the emphasis away from our sin-pardon towards suffering-awakening is not to deny the human capacity for wrongdoing. In fact, it lets us see more clearly why it is that we continue to act wrongly - because we are not ourselves, we do not see clearly. As the Desert Father Abba Bessarion said, 'We should be as the cherubim and seraphim: all eye.'

This is a very cursory exploration of a complex issue, but I think this change in emphasis is consistent with the gospel and lets us present the Christian way in a manner that makes sense in a society where we appear always to be giving the answer to a question no one is asking.

Is God A Concept?

There is an excellent piece in today's Guardian which defends the work of philosophy against its potlitical detractors. The Australian philosopher Paul Redding responds to a critical comment about a piece of research he is engaged in by offering a well-reasoned defence of the work of interrogating concepts. Concepts 'describe those aspects of thought that enables it to make the right connections: connections with the rest of the world; with other thoughts; and with actions. I use the word "right" here to indicate the possibility of getting these connections wrong.' I am wholeheartedly in favour of this project and think that it is too easy in our public discourse to devalue the careful thinking that is undertaken by philosophers, theologians, historians, literary critics and many others who work in the realm of human thought.

Interestingly, the research he defends concerns the 'concept' of God. From Redding's description, the work is intended to find a reasonable way through the current and noisy debates between 'new atheists' and religious believers. It seeks to do this by examining an earlier conversation between a theologian and a philosopher in the 18th century which provided a new way of looking at the concept of 'God'. I would be very interested in seeing the outcome of this work and it seems to me to be a very worthwhile enterprise, because much of the current debate consists of sterile and sometimes uncharitable rhetoric from both sides.

I am curious about the use of the term 'concept' in relation to God. Clearly, there is a strong sense in which our talk about God is conceptual talk, but religious people would probably not think about God solely or even primarily in conceptual terms, but in experiential or existential terms. There is also a relational dimension to our experience of God and, for many people, a cultic one (I use the term neutrally). Our conception of God is usually a secondary matter, though not an unimportant one. This is not to engage in some kind of obscurantism and I am very much in favour of religious people exposing their conceptual apparatus to wider scrutiny to make sure that they are not making the kind of 'wrong connections' Redding warns us about. To use a very well-worn analogy, the use of conceptual thinking in relation to faith is much like the use of such thinking in relation to our personal relationships: we can talk sensibly and usefully about the concepts of love, marriage or whatever, but we are always conscious that we are dealing in second-level thinking. Our romantic choices are rarely made with the use of a well-crafted algorithm.

But my main reaction to this article is delight that a professional philosopher regards the examination of our religous ideas as a worthwhile enterprise. It does, after all, make sense for us to give careful consideration to one of humanity's most enduring and powerful set of experiences.

Why do we misunderstand each other?

John O'Malley's excellent and concise book about the Council of Trent raises some fascinating questions about what might have been if the political circumstances of that turbulent period in European history had been different. He also does justice to the complex theological issues behind the Council and navigates skillfully through the twin conciliar processes looking at reform and doctrine. The key Reformation issue of justification is given interesting treatment and O'Malley shows the spectrum of views held by the Council's theologians, some of which come close to Luther's position. The question, in essence, is to do with the extent to which human will and effort play a part in the process of one's justification before God and this, of course, has implications for the place of the sacraments in the Christian life. But one of his most compelling insights in this part of his survey of the Council concerns the way in which the Council and Luther were coming at the issue from very different modes of knowledge.

Luther's writing is vigorous, polemical, passionate, exuberant, intemperate and personal. The Council's decrees are precise, concise, Scholastic and systematic. Luther's concern was primarily an existential one: how can I know that I am reconciled to God? The Council's concern was a doctrinal one: how can we define the limits of Catholic teaching on this matter? Both, of course, were also concerned with reform of the church's way of operating, and it would be foolish to draw too clear a distinction between these sets of concerns, but the fundamental difference of the dominant mode of knowing over the matter of justification is a vital insight.

It is not the case that doctrinal formulations and existential explorations inhabit separate worlds, but we do get into trouble when we get mixed up about what sort of language we are using to describe different kinds of knowing. It is a frequent concern of mine that religious and anti-religious people often fail to understand each other because of a failure to acknowledge different kinds of knowing and, from O'Malley's brief comment on justification, we can see that the church also runs into this problem in its internal discourse. We can sing something in a hymn that would make little sense in a cathechism and, conversely, precise philosophical language does not always make good poetry. More seriously, if we interact over matters of faith on the level of abstract intellectual discourse, but do not get to the heart of how faith shapes the real lives and choices of believers, we have not addressed the fullness of religious life nor, indeed, of human life. We do not only interact with the world around us through our brains, but also through our guts, our bodies, our breath, our hearts.

 

The Church of England Baffles Me Once More

...this time on the ordination of women as bishops. When the Scottish Episcopal Church agreed that this was a sensible and godly thing to do, there really wasn't that much fuss and very few people indeed decided that this made their church somehow uninhabitable. The C of E, however, seems to have got itself spectacularly knotted about this matter. Of all the baffling things about this, here are the ones that baffle me most:

1. Most ordinary members of the C of E have no problem with this at all. They've had a great woman priest in their parish, why shouldn't she be a bishop? I'd be surprised if many more than one in a hundred had objections.
2. Why should the church not regard equality as an Evangelical (demanded by the Gospel), Catholic (right for the wellbeing of the church) and, above all, human principle? Jesus seemed to behave as if we are equal before God so why should we do different?
3. Can an Episcopal church have a situation where a small group within it have an enshrined right to regard some of its bishops as fake bishops? Surely, if you think your bishop is not a real bishop, you do not, by definition, belong to his or her church.
4. Furthermore, even following their logic that a woman is simply not able to receive ordination, on what grounds would the opponents of women's ordination regard as a fake bishop any male bishop who thinks they can? Are there other theological opinions that would similarly invalidate a male bishop's orders?
5. I presume that those male Anglican priests who use the language of 'sacramental assurance' are aware that their own orders and the sacraments over which they preside are not regarded as valid by the churches whose assent they say is needed for any decision to admit women to orders of ministry.
6. However strongly I disagree with their theology, I can see some consistency in the views of conservative Evangelicals who simply think that the Bible prohibits women from exercising leadership in the church, though I wonder how they still feel comfortable in a church that has had women in such roles for years now. But it seems to me that the conservative part of the C of E's Catholic wing has got itself into severe theological difficulties over this. In effect, they have had to construct a notion that there are certain kinds of decision that the C of E does not have authority to make on its own. Apparently it did have authority to set up its autonomous power structures, to secede from Rome, to radically redesign the medieval sacramental system, to abolish clerical celibacy, to entirely dismantle the religious life, to adopt a clear statement of Reformed theology in its 39 Articles of Religion, to cease commemorating a whole range of saints, to introduce the vernacular in liturgy and to appoint its own bishops (after a fashion).
7. I do respect the concern of those who see the episcopal ordination of women as a severe difficulty in our ecumenical relations with other churches. However, the Roman Catholic church has fruitful and longstanding ecumenical relations with other churches that ordain women. I also know from experience that the refusal to ordain women impares our ecumenical work with other churches.
8. I am aware how difficult it is to include the views of those who oppose equality in a society or organisation that seeks to be fair to all, but I do not think it is appropriate for those who oppose the ordination of women to characterise themselves as a persecuted minority. The awful history of women's place in church and society should lead them to consider more circumspect language...

I don't think I'm alone in being very weary indeed of the theological high mindedness and political bitterness that accompanies much of this debate in the English part of the Anglican family. The simple truth seems to me to be that it is, very simply, the right thing to do.

Mystical Union - Good Theology and Gay Marriage

There has been a lot of noise and heat of late in the discussions around the consultations of governments north and south of the border about the possibility of extending marriage to same sex couples. The noisiest of these noises has come from the north with the preposterously apocalyptic views of Cardinal O'Brien with a more measured pastoral letter coming from Archbishops Nichols and Smith. Indeed, I was pleasantly surprised at some of the very good theology in the letter which, in one place, describes how the creative life of a married couple is a participation in the life of God:

As a Sacrament, this is a place where divine grace flows. Indeed, marriage is a sharing in the mystery of God’s own life: the unending and perfect flow of love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

What is not clear to me is why this creative, life-giving mutuality cannot exist between people of the same sex. Indeed, the letter argues to some extent from the experience of married couples, so it would same fair to acknowledge that the experience of same-sex couples is that such unions can be no less mutual, creative or sacramental. And the use of the beautiful image of the 'perfect flow of love' within the Trinity surely takes the thinking far beyond the narrow demand for gender difference within a committed relationship. There is, after all, no gender in God who needs no 'father and mother' to create life. Of course, it is true that same sex couples do not have the biological capacity to reproduce, but this is very far from saying that they do not have the capacity to create a loving family, to love and educate children, to create a welcoming home or to bring to life what lies hidden in each other, their children, their wider families, their friends or, indeed, the wider community.

The letter gets into further theologically awkward territory on the insistence that only mixed sex couples are capable of 'complementarity'. That simply does not reflect the true lived experience of human relationships and may, indeed, play into a very socially conditioned notion of the distinctive roles of the genders. Complementarity does not depend on sex but on mutual understanding (and self-understanding).

But the letter does not draw on one of the most widely used images of the church when referring to marriage; that of a mystical union like the one that exists 'betwixt Christ and his Church' to use the language of the Book of Common Prayer. I suspect this may be because the writers thought they were on safer ground with their argument from nature. But there was a very interesting piece in Saturday's Guardian by a gay Catholic who said that he would not want to be married to his partner because he felt that a civil partnership more clearly expressed mature mutuality in a relationship. Marriage, by contrast, was a relationship that required mutual subjection. While I strongly disagree with his choice of words, I think Martin Pendergast has touched on something that the Archbishops missed. If there is something in marriage that reflects the mystical union between Christ and the Church, it seems likely to me that that 'something' is a mutual sacrificial self-giving which enriches the life of the other. I would say that this is very much not the same thing as 'subjection', which has notions of domination and imbalance but that it is the most perfect reflection of the nature of the 'mystical union' envisaged by the prayer book.

I would suggest that this is at the heart of Christian marriage and I see no reason why it cannot be at the heart of a Christian marriage between people of the same sex.

Why Bother with the Bible?

That is the question posed by Richard Dawkins in his recent debate with Rowan Williams in Oxford. As far as Dawkins can see, there is no point in reading a text whose 'explanations' have been superseded by superior modern discoveries. You can see the whole debate here and it's well worth a look. It's a much more irenic exchange than most of those involving Prof Dawkins and is genuinely inquiring about the question of the origin of consciousness (much more interesting than the fixation Dawkins has with 'design' and he's far less clear cut in his response). I don't really understand his point about the Bible. For most of us, and for most of history, Christians have not understood the Bible as a literal source of 'scientific' knowledge but as a text through which we come to know God. You don't read Darwin to learn how to cook and you don't read the Bible to understand evolution.

But there's a more interesting mistake that Dawkins makes about how Christians use the Bible. [As an aside, please forgive me for referring to Richard Dawkins yet again. I do so because he seems to me to be an interesting barometer for how people in this part of the world at this point in history misunderstand religion. And I include many religious people in that.] In his recent survey of the 'beliefs' of people who self-define as Christian, he asked how often they read the Bible on their own, as if this was a more reliable indicator of religiosity than hearing it in church. Again, a bit of history will go a long way here. It is only in the recent past that the majority of people began to read the Bible on their own and, for many Christians, it is far more important that the Bible is read in communion and in continuity with the community within which it arose and within which it has been read and reread - the Church.

As I have suggested many times before, we always read texts like the Bible with a considerable history of interpretation behind us. We are reading the multiple interpretations as much as we are reading the text itself. let me give an example. I'm preparing a sermon for Sunday focusing on the strange and awful text of Genesis 22 which describes the 'binding of Isaac'. To make sense of this story, I have referred to modern writings about the place of Mt Moriah in the imagination of Jews and Muslims, to Kierkegaard's famous thought experiment on the story (Fear and Trembling), to the depictions on canvas of the moment of almost-sacrifice by Caravaggio and Rembrandt, to a modern reflection on these paintings, to a 20th Century Jewish commentary on the text, to the original Hebrew of the story, to a modern work on the place of mountains in human imagination and to my pastoral practice in a cancer hospital. On top of that, I have read the story alongside the Gospel narrative with which it is paired - Mark's account of the Transfiguration - and the representation of that story in Eastern iconography. Of course, not all of this will find its way into a sermon of little over 1000 words, but whether we acknowledge it or not, this history of interpretation by real communities of people struggling to make sense of life makes our reading infinitely rich and fecund.

Karen Armstrong makes the case strongly in The Case for God that we cannot think of religious texts and religious insights separately from the lived experience of communities of practice. We read these texts together within the context of worship, ritual and compassionate practice. They don't sit on our shelves like reference books. We make judgements about the relative prominence given to the texts based on that history of reflection while never being dismissive of the possibility that our judgements often need to be adjusted in the light of experience. Alongside the Bible, a wonderful example of this is the Rule of St Benedict, which still guides the life of nuns and monks across the world after 14 centuries of lived experience. It would be foolish to suppose that this little piece of Wisdom literature is read and practised in exactly the same way now as it was at the time of its writing, but it would be equally foolish to ignore the real continuities of practice and insight.

We bother with the Bible because others have done so before us, because others do so with us and because this collective bothering has yeilded hard-won insights into the mysteries of human life.

I'd like to offer a reflection from another Richard, Ricjhard Rohr, the radical American Franciscan. I think he says all of this much better than I can:

How can we look at the Biblical text in a manner that will convert us or change us? I am going to define the Bible in a new way for some of you.The Bible is an honest conversation with humanity about where power really is. All spiritual texts, including the Bible, are books whose primary focus lies outside of themselves, in the Holy Mystery. The Bible is to illuminate your human experience through struggling with it. It is not a substitute for human experience. It is an invitation into the struggle itself—you are supposed to be bothered by some of the texts. Human beings come to consciousness by struggle, and most especially struggle with God and sacred texts. We largely remain unconscious if we avoid all conflicts, dilemmas, paradoxes, inconsistencies, or contradictions.

The Bible is a book filled with conflicts and paradoxes and historical inaccuracies. It is filled with contradictions and it is precisely in learning to struggle with these seeming paradoxes that we grow up—not by avoiding them with a glib one-sentence answer that a 16-year-old can memorize. If I had settled for the mostly one-line answers to everything from my Fr. McGuire’s Baltimore Catechism, my spiritual journey would have been over in the third grade. And for many people, otherwise educated in other fields, that is exactly what happened. We created people with quick answers instead of humble searchers for God and truth, which never just falls into your lap, but is only given as a gift to those who really want it and desire it.

 

Humanity - Helpless or Heroic?

In his review of Karen Armstrong's book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, Richard Holloway pointed out a significant difficulty in Armstrong's thesis in relation to Christianity and Islam. He said that these two religions did not fit comfortably into her contention that, at heart, religions have a major focus on living compassionately because they are 'redemption' religions rather than 'wisdom' religions. In the case of Christianity, he pointed out a less than happy history of actions that contradict a compassionate imperative on the basis that a redemption religion ends up with those who are lost and those who are saved. I think Richard is largely right in relation to major strands of Christian religion (I can't speak for Islam) but I would like to suggest that there is a significant 'minority report' in the Western Christian tradition that suggests something much closer to a 'wisdom' religion. I also think that the binary characterisation he posits is not as simple as it first might seems, and that there is not necessarily (and, more significantly, not in practice) a contradiction here.

As for my plea for the recognition of that 'minority report', I offer first of all the earliest strains of monastic tradition in Christianity. It is clear to me that the Rule of St Benedict is a work of Wisdom literature and that the exercise of Benedictine life through the centuries has confirmed this approach. The Rule is a book of practical wisdom about a life lived in pursuit of virtue and it continues to provide inspiration to its monastic adherents and to millions of others who are captivated by its measured and humane words. Going further back, I would also argue that the Desert tradition of which the rule is an inheritor also focuses on a practical spirituality designed to give the Christian disciple insight into the challenges of living a life of self-awareness and virtue. These traditions are by no means lacking in a mystical dimension, and this is to be seen as the interior motivation and foundation for a good life lived close its ultimate source.

My suspicion is that much of residual or folk Christianity in the UK bears the marks of this approach. Richard Dawkins' Foundation's much trumpeted report on the attitudes of those who declare themselves to be Christian seems to suggest as much. His take on the data was that this shows that those who think they are Christians are not really so because they don't think the things that he thinks Christians are supposed to think. Most of us who are involved in the lived expression of people's latent or blatant religiosity were not in the least surprised by the findings. They emphasise that people think that 'being a Christian' is somewhat close to 'being a good person' and that to call oneself a Christian is an aspiration as much as a statement of certain conviction. Most interestingly, the character of the faith that comes out in the survey is much more that of a 'wisdom' religion than a 'redemption' one - trying to be a good person inspired by the life and teachings of Jesus. It seems that my 'minority report' is only 'minority' in the sense that it does not sit entirely comfortably with the official discourse of Christian orthodoxy.

My second point is that there need not be so much of a difference between a religion focused on redemption - a rescue of the helpless from their predicament by a God who steps in to sort it out - and a religion focused on wisdom - a religion of heroic effort whereby the human person or community draws on teachings and practices to live a better life. In my day-to-day work, I am chaplain to a specialist cancer hospital so I spend much of my time with people who find themselves in a position of more weakness than they have ever experienced before. Sometimes when we are at our weakest, we do find inner strength that we hadn't known before. But sometimes we really find that we have little 'power of ourselves to help ourselves'. People often find that it is in the moment of weakness that an extraordinary transformation occurs: far from always needing heroic effort, our desire to live a good and fulfilled life is sometimes best met by a kind of letting go, a profound awareness of our limitation and a clear-sighted acceptance of how things are. It is when we come up against our limits that we discover our shape.

With its focus on the events of Jesus' cricifixion, Christian faith ought to be well-equipped to accept this insight. But it is not alone in doing so. In another of her insightful works, The Case for God, Karen Armstrong introduces a very similar notion in Socratic philosophical inquiry. True wisdom comes at the point where we discover its limitations, and we need to undergo the careful explorations of wisdom in order to come to this point - there are no shortcuts. So it seems to me that the effectiveness of our religious and philosophical traditions needs both wisdom and redemption, virtue and contemplation, effort and rescue, works and faith. These poles belong together and need each other. The 16th century Reformation was all about this problem, but in the end, it seems to me that the argument was really about little more than scheduling.

I am an Atheist

I am an atheist if, by 'God', you mean a cosmic puppeteer who takes away our autonomy and organises the minutiae of every life.

I am an atheist if, by 'God', you mean an unflinching judge who likes nothing better than catching people out on an arbitrary set of rules and punishing them accordingly, delighting at their downfall.

I am an atheist if, by 'God', you mean our tribal mascot who rallies us to get one over on the other lot.

I am an atheist if, by 'God', you mean a totem of prim morality that idolises the nuclear family, detests any expression of human love that does not fit this model.

I am an atheist if, by 'God', you mean a trump card to play in any argument that terminates all debate.

I am an atheist if, by 'God', you mean one who is less than indifferent to the suffering of the abused, the cry of the hungry and the agony of the poor.

I am an atheist if, by 'God', you mean anything that excludes any of our imperfect human expressions of wonder, love, mystery and longing.

I am an atheist if, by 'God', you mean one who is more interested in the precise formulations of our minds than the dispositions of our hearts.