The Divine Universe

I have been re-reading a book that caused a sensation in the Anglican Church some forty-five years ago. That was a time when Anglicans were more concerned about evangelism than sexual orientation. Bishop John Robinson believed that the Church had a deep-seated problem in presenting God to the contemporary secular society. He described the problem at length in his book Honest to God (SCM Press. 1963). It is interesting to reflect if things have changed since that time.

Robinson believed that the problem was, basically, the Church’s tendency to talk of God as a being that exists alongside other beings (the universe), and that he is somehow “out there” in a place called heaven beyond the bright blue sky, beyond the universe.

In the 1960s quite a lot of people still went to church, though the number was smaller than during World War Two, and shrinking. Robinson attributed this loss of belief mainly to a reified, “out there” kind of theism: seeing God as a discrete entity in the midst of nothingness. He was also concerned about the popular idea of Jesus as not quite human but only partly divine – a sort of theological mixture. His experience told him that, while churchgoers were still content with those notions, increasing numbers of people found them incompatible with reason and modern-day thinking. Atheists were having a field day.

However, Robinson thought there was hope for a “new reformation”. He cited the writings of radical and controversial theologians like Dietrich Bonhöffer, who made an enigmatic reference to what he called “religionless Christianity” in one of his letters from a Nazi prison, Paul Tillich with his notion that we should see God as the “ground of our being” rather than someone up in heaven, and Rudolf Bultmann, who stressed the mythological nature of much Biblical writing.

The book raised a storm of protest from conservative church people, clerical and lay. Some even accused Robinson of being an atheist and demanded his resignation. I believe that, today, such a book would cause less outrage; it would probably attract little interest in fact. Numbers in the pew have continued to fall and the average age to rise. People mostly don’t actively deny Church doctrine; they simply see it as irrelevant to real life. Apathy is a greater threat to faith than atheism, which is an act of faith anyway. In 1963, Bishop Wand was able to say that the word ‘religion’ still stood for the highest values in life. I doubt if that could be said today.

The ongoing decline of church attendance has been attended by other significant cultural and social changes over the years. One has been the emergence of a popular hunger for spirituality, often expressed in so-called “new age” cults, usually focussed on our relationship with the natural world. Many people today say they are interested in spirituality but not in institutional religion. Even those who are respectful of religion still feel no desire to be involved. Conservative Christians are hostile toward new age spirituality and sceptical about spirituality focussed in nature. They tend to see the environment as something separate: something to conquer and control. They are sceptical about climate change and the need for environmental care. (Cardinal Pell is a prominent local example of this attitude.)

Another development has been a growing interest in other religions and in interfaith dialogue. There might be as many people interested in religion now as there were in the 1960s, but there is more diversity.

The rising average standard of living has also had an impact. With more money, people have more ways to enjoy themselves at weekends. Young people have cars. Even retirees can afford to do more interesting things than going to church.

Of course, the simplest answer to all this is to say that all these people ought to go to church like I do and my ancestors before me, but wrapping oneself up in a warm blanket of self-righteousness (relieved that we’re not gay or lesbian) doesn’t really help. Jesus told his disciples (not just clergy, because there weren’t any) to go out and proclaim the Good News.

Jesus did this himself, not by issuing a new set of dogma, but by telling made-up stories about daily life with a challenging twist to them. We need to be able to communicate the Good News in terms of modern life and modern thinking in this affluent, materialistic, sceptical, scientific age rather than trying to sell them theological dogma or, even less, tell them what their sexual inclinations must not be.

There has been one significant development during the last hundred years: the radical change in scientific thinking. Relativity and quantum theory have revolutionised nearly all scientists’ view of reality. It is much less materialistic. The more physicists learn about the fundamental nature of matter, the less material it seems to be. They explore four ubiquitous fields of energy and the intricate dance that goes on in them that create the illusion of solids, liquids and gases. They talk like mystics at times. This has led to a new burst of dialogue between academic scientists and theologians, and they are finding an astonishing degree of resonance between the two fields of study. Palaeontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, was a pioneer in this process, writing about the same time as Robinson. He had a mystic’s understanding of the material world. Mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme, says that we should see the universe as a spiritual event rather than as a material object. If this were to flow down to ordinary church people or even to the clergy, it would open a new channel of communication with scientifically minded society. More importantly it could open up for us Western Christians a new vision of God for ourselves in the material world around us. This is something that has always been essential in other religions and in earlier European Christianity, but was lost during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution.

Generally, the Good News is most effectively communicated, not through theology or dogma, but by opening people’s eyes to God around them. This is what Jesus’ parables did. The Nicene Creed is a useful tool for certain occasions, but I’ve never heard of anyone being converted by it. Even more effective is action: acts of love, compassion, forgiveness, understanding and tolerance.

There is much debate these days among the clergy about how to “be church” in new ways. Perhaps there is now more general agreement about the need for a “new reformation”. Perhaps we still need to be more honest to God.