Christianity faces extinction and it is not science but Christians themselves who are to blame for its demise, argues AN Wilson
The millennium is the anniversary of an event that we no longer believe: namely, the birth of Almighty God in human form in a stable in Bethlehem.
How, at this date in history, could we possibly claim that Christianity was literally true? But those who were in the vanguard of destroying the Christian faith over the past 200 years were not a tiny handful of atheist philosophers and agnostic scientists. It was the Christians themselves. Christianity will decline yet further in the next 1 000 years to the point of near extinction because Christians themselves no longer believe it to be true.
If you went to a theological seminary, or a university where religion was being taught; if you went to a college where they were training ministers of the gospel; if you studied the Bible using the most searching and honest commentaries, written by men and women who devoted a lifetime of scholarship to the subject, you would find only a minority of these scholars professing old-fashioned, fully orthodox Christian beliefs.
You would find that many of them were priests or ministers of their particular church. You would find that they attended the various rites of those churches. But ask them: “Do you believe that God Almighty took human flesh in the person of Jesus?” and I suspect you would find only a minority able to say an unambiguous “Yes!”
Do they believe that Jesus was born in Bethlehem? Only a tiny handful of Bible scholars believe that. Fewer, I should guess, believe he was born of a virgin. Many would say that they believed in the Resurrection, but ask them to say whether they believe in the gospel accounts of an empty tomb, and you will find that they do not.
You would, of course, find plenty of rabbis who interpret the Jewish scriptures in more or less the same way that rabbis were reading the Bible in the lifetime of Jesus. You would find nearly all Muslim scholars and imams reading the holy Qur’an in exactly the same sense as that in which it was written in the 7th century. That is because you can still have interesting, plausible arguments about God and morality, whereas so much of Christian myth is falsifiable. It makes truth claims that are not true. Christianity came to a crisis point 150 years ago when all these skeletons came out of its cupboard. German biblical scholars were taking the Bible to bits at just the moment when the scientists were casting doubt on the very idea of a Creator.
Of course, you can still go on believing that there is a God after reading Darwin’s Origin of Species. Darwin’s discoveries did, however, for many earnest seekers after truth, remove any need to find purpose in nature or a mind behind the universe. Darwin revealed a process that was self-sufficient, which did not need a deus ex machina. Or indeed a deus a god of any kind.
A remarkable fact about the history of English Christianity, and in particular of Anglicanism in the middle of the 20th century, was the large number of poets and novelists who explored the faith and its implications in their writings.
Think of Dorothy L Sayers, Charles Williams, the CS Lewis of the science-fiction trilogy and Narnia, or Barbara Pym all in their different ways exploring church or religious life on an imaginative scale that would have surprised their parents’ agnostic generation.
One remembers Ivy Compton-Burnett’s impatience with her contemporary Rose Macaulay when she read her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, and realised that Rose had returned to the faith. “Why can’t she remain a perfectly sensible agnostic like everyone else?”
Two writers stand out, to my mind, in this period who were most defiant in their refusal to be perfectly sensible agnostics: the first is TS Eliot, the second his sometime pupil, John Betjeman.
If I think again of this place, and of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness, But some particular genius, All touched by a common genius, United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall, of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten In other places, here and abroad, and of one who died blind and quiet,
Why should we celebrate these dead men more than the dying?
This is one of those resonant passages of the Four Quartets that must have thrilled the generation of Christians who first read it, as much as it dismayed those who felt that literature should move on, leaving this old baggage behind us. There will be many now, I suspect, to whom the lines are incomprehensible.
“We cannot restore old policies/ Or follow an antique drum” becomes a prophecy that applies directly to the inner life of Eliot’s own church a church that seemed so alive when Betjeman was worshipping in it:
Wonder beyond Time’s wonders, that Bread so white and small Veiled in golden curtains, too mighty for men to see, Is the Power which sends the shadows up this polychrome wall, Is God who created the planet, the chain-smoking millions and me; Beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself to Thee.
It is impossible not to be moved by this poem. Equally, it is difficult to imagine anyone writing it nowadays, yet it was published only 50 years ago.
Those of us who read the poetry of Milton without a grounding in classical literature are forever fumbling about in footnotes trying to find out where the fountain of Arethusa was. We’re hardly reading we are engaged in minor archaeology. No echoes occur.
Eliot was trying to bring back, by means of pastiche architecture, the echoes of Dante, Shakespeare, Sanskrit and Mother Julian of Norwich into our common language so that we could speak with shared images and symbols.
Without shared images and symbols, religion does not function. Nor does literature. Future generations will be deaf to both.
Since the 19th century there have been strides forward in the field of biblical scholarship, and this is something in which we can all rejoice. Inevitably it would lead to fresh translations of the Bible as new understanding emerged. But did it really necessitate the abolition of the 17th-century translation in its liturgical context?
The church of Rome had been tinkering with its liturgy throughout the 20th century, altering the Easter ceremonies in ways barely noticeable to those who were not obsessives. But what can have possessed it to abolish the so-called Tridentine mass, a liturgy which was in essence 1 000 years older than the Council of Trent?
Eager to show that it could be as modern as Rome, the Church of England, which had a perfectly good vernacular liturgy, and which had developed since 1928 a perfectly workable way of adding local variations to it, chose to concoct what is quite possibly the most disgracefully ugly, unmemorable liturgy devised in the history of the human race.
It makes all its addresses to the Godhead seem like police statements read back to an unfortunate victim in the dock. “From age to age you gathered a people to yourself.” How inelegant, and how meaningless, to have changed the immemorial liturgical exchange “Dominus Vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo” into “The Lord be with you. And also with you.” It recalls the exchanges of schoolchildren: “The same to you with brass knobs on.”
Why did they do it? What blasphemous arrogance possessed them? Why did they think that their decades the 1960s and 1970s were so superior to anything that had gone before that they could uproot, change and uglify time-honoured liturgical routines that had sustained the generation of Queen Elizabeth, of Launcelot Andrews, and the Royal Martyr; of Pepys and Dryden and Queen Anne; of Dean Swift and Samuel Johnson; of Coleridge and Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott (who was converted from Presbyterianism by the liturgy alone); of the Victorian doubters, and those Eliot, Betjeman and Macaulay included who in the 20th century returned blinking with amazement to the altar of God?
In each case, what they returned to was the faith embodied in certain words that had always been adapted, modified and altered in small ways, but which remained fundamentally the same. The modernists called for the old symbols and words to be interpreted in ways that made sense to modern people. And in many cases, that meant not interpreting them at all.
Most of us who have felt time spent in church was unwasted recall either moments of silence, or moments when music was playing. But utterly to change the words and the furniture! This removes the possibility of partaking in the one shared symbol. It introduces new and facile expressions that grate on the ear, and destroys one of the principal functions of liturgical recitations, whether of the scriptures or of the sacramental mystery namely, that one generation passes on to the next the words and experiences of its predecessors.
We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree Are of equal duration. A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments …
The liturgy was above all a pattern of timeless moments, daily repeated in quires and places where they sing. It was a far more important function of the church than Thought for the Day, or the woefully misdirected attempts to speak in the language of young people, or to teach imagined categories of being far beyond the ken of the average parson such as ordinary people, or people in inner cities. The liturgy was for all sorts and conditions of people; its failure to attempt relevance was what made it timelessly and irreplaceably relevant.
There is no point in Latin Mass societies or prayer book societies. Much as we sympathise with the die-hards and the nostalgic brigade, they are crying to the moon. The damage was done when common prayer ceased to be common prayer and when in the great Western church a unifying language far more unifying than Esperanto, a truly universal tongue in which the human race could voice its deepest prayers and yearnings in a debased version of the language of the Caesars was replaced by the Babel-sound of multilingual masses.
How might faith be communicated to a future age, or how might it be understood imaginatively by writers? I don’t see how it can be now, because its common language has been vandalised by the clergy. While the new Book of Common Worship nominally contains some of the older liturgy for alternative use, one wonders how many clergymen will actually use it. We hate the clergy for this, and it is one of the reasons that many of us, who used to love the church, and who still love the old buildings and the ancient music, find that our affection for the institutional church has all but evaporated. I am talking about that Barbara Pymish love of all things churchy it is hard to imagine many imaginative people sustaining it in the future. Her own diaries reflect the distress and disappointment felt by a pious woman in central London in search of unwrecked liturgy in her lunch hour. There was something so arrogant about the changes. They implied that we could throw away what had been for others the means of grace, the symbols of the ultimate mystery, and make up our own version. Typical of the ethos is the habit that came in, almost as soon as the liturgy changed, of spontaneous homilies being spoken after the gospel as though the busy office worker would want to hear five minutes of banal thoughts made up on the spur of the moment rather than the old words, the tried and trusted words, the words which, worn and smooth like old, well-trodden stones, had been heard so often before and which had so often nourished and sustained, regardless of the doubts and dryness of those who heard them.
I cannot see how Christianity can survive in anything like the form that previous generations of Christians, for the last 1950 years, would have recognised as Christian, now that it has departed from the concept of an orally transmitted faith.
The leadership of the churches is dishonest. There is no other word for it unless you add cowardly. They have been theologically educated. They know that concepts such as the physical resurrection and the virgin birth are not “true” as history. But they do not dare, even at the beginning of this new millennium, to rock the boat. As a result, nearly all of us stay outside the church and watch its decline with a mixture of sorrow and schadenfreude. What else does an organisation expect, which so consistently refuses to be intellectually serious?
We come to church to be serious and we expect serious responses to the doubts and philosophical changes that have happened to all of us in the past 200 years.
We do not expect kindergarten squabbles about miracles. Christianity invented a way of looking at human nature and the inner life which is part and parcel of our very civilisation. It invented the inner life well, St Augustine in many ways invented the inner life.
There is no need to believe in consciousness; many psychologists from William James onwards would say there was no such thing. There is no need to believe in individualism; the physicalist school of psychology/ philosophy would discourage any such faith. Yet many of us feel that not to nourish these myths is to erode an important part of our self-consciousness, not only as individuals but as a society.
The novel the great expression of the idea that there are millions of people flitting about the planet being different from one another derives directly from the Christian fiction of a soul. Christian artists are often those who have managed a synthesis of ideas which appear to destroy the old but actually invigorate it.
Think of Dante, who almost single-handedly made Aquinas imaginatively accessible. Aquinas was the genius who fashioned the discoveries of Arab mathematics and logic, the writings of Averroes, the rediscovery of Aristotle none of them compatible with Christian orthodoxies into a new synthesis by which the human race could understand itself, talk to itself, for another 400 years. What happened in the 19th century was that no Aquinas arose, no Dante to absorb Darwinism, determinism, Freudianism or Marxian materialism, or “perfectly sensible agnosticism”.
Now that the habit of learning the old Christian stories and prayers has all but died out, now that Christianity has turned itself back into a sect, there really seems to be no future. There will be Christians in the next generation, but we can be sadly certain that there will be no Christian literature that came to an end with the generation of Eliot.
Yet many human beings would still wish to echo the first great modern metaphysician, Immanuel Kant, when he said: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me.”
When all the mythologies of religion have been discarded and when all the false theories of Christianity have been exposed by patient and honest scholars, men and women of a reflective turn of mind will remain convinced that there is underlying the universe a deep moral purpose. Lose this sense of seriousness and life becomes unendurable. Most of us are too busy to follow the intricacies of Kant’s philosophical journeying, but we believe these things in our gut. There is a religion that satisfies this deep human need for a moral code without a mythology. It is not Christianity.
The mullahs and the imams of Islam preach the same undiluted message which was first given to the world by the Holy Prophet in the 6th and 7th centuries. While the West tries to dub the followers of Islam fundamentalist lunatics, increasing numbers of people turn to the Qur’an and find in this book what they have always craved: a moral and an intellectual acknowledgement of the lordship of God without the encumbrance of Christian mythological baggage in which almost no one really believes. That is why Christianity will decline in this millennium, and the next religious hunger of the human heart will be answered by the Crescent, not by the Cross.
This is an edited extract from AN Wilson’s essay Christianity and Modernity