Check out Ed Watson's thought-provoking homily, delivered last night at the College Eucharist:
The theme that ran through the sermons of last term was the relationship between change and tradition. The debate over the balance we should strike between the two is important: without change we become stymied, without tradition we forget what it was we were trying to do in the first place. It is a discussion I wish to carry forward into this service.
Most who know me know that in such debates I tend to come down on the side of change. I love finding new things to do, and new ways of doing old things, perhaps to a fault. I am no different when it comes to religion: I believe not only that Christianity should change, but that it must change. I believe that the changes it needs to undergo are so fundamental that when it emerges on the other side many will question whether it is indeed still Christianity in any meaningful sense.
I am going to briefly outline both the motivation and the matter of these changes. I am then going to try and argue that the product of these changes would remain a branch of Christianity, because it would still embody Christianity's essential tradition. My argument as presented here is not intended to convince, lacking as it is in important detail: it is merely designed to provide a sketch of a wider theological project.
Much has been made in recent times of the advances of science at the cost of Christianity. I think the dialectic set up by the new atheists between modern mainstream Christianity and science is a false dialectic. Einstein once said that science could not give us the flavour of soup: by the same principle, neither can it give us an account of the moral content of the world. Nor do I think it should try, any more than Christianity should try to provide a grand unified theory of physics. But even though I do not think mainstream Christianity and science are in genuine competition, I do think there are many lessons that religions of all stripes can learn from science. The most important of these lessons is that progress is only possible through challenging, and sometimes abandoning, assumptions that are at the time thought unassailable.
According to Thomas Kuhn, the greatest leaps in scientific progress come not through the process of building upon past theory, but through paradigm shifts, in which the entire edifice of past theory is torn down and restructured, foundations included. It is through such paradigm shifts that we discovered that the sun doesn't orbit the earth, and it is from such paradigm shifts that the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics emerged. These discoveries were possible only because scientists were willing to reject the assumptions of their peers, and because a sufficient number of those peers were willing to listen to them. Because of them, science over the centuries has proved a dynamic discipline, ever adapting to new challenges, and ever providing new answers to old questions.
In Christianity, there are no such paradigm shifts. Certainly, there have been changes, and the reformation is evidence enough that it is far from a static entity, but these changes have not been paradigm shifts: they have been shifts within a single paradigm. Because of this, modern Christianity is stuck in a conceptual scheme two thousand years old, a conceptual scheme that cannot engage with the world today in many respects. Modern Christians have to respond to their critics with answers that are based upon reasoning constructed in a world without the internet, without chemistry or advanced medical knowledge, a world without even the concept of a Large Hadron Collider.
This is not, perhaps, surprising: Christianity is far from the ideal vehicle for change. Indeed, over the centuries it has often proved itself a perfect nest of intolerance and the human lust for certainty. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of the claims that many Christians wish to make: when your evidence is supposed to be gifted to you by the supreme being, then how could your answer be anything other than the only answer, eternal and unchanging?
This is not to say Christian thought is uncritical: indeed, the most penetrating criticisms of the Church tend come from within. But though through such criticism there has been an acceptance of human fallibility within the Church, there has not, to my knowledge, been an acceptance within mainstream Christianity itself that this fallibility extends its corrupting influence right down to the Church's core tenets.
If, however, one does accept that this is the case, then the game changes: if our most fundamental beliefs could be based upon the products of human error, then even in this land of idols nothing is sacrosanct: we can thus look for new ways to answer old questions, and thus attain the freedom to free ourselves of the dead weight which keeps Christianity bound to a dogma two thousand years old.
I can think of no better example of such dead weight than the authority accorded to the Bible. I was in Durham at the beginning of the Christmas holidays, and became engaged in a debate with a friend over whether or not the Church of England should have female bishops. My friend is a kind, gentle and loving human being, but at the same time he believes that women should not be bishops. What was the root of his reasoning? That the idea of female bishops is unbiblical. Anyone with a passing knowledge of 1 Timothy, Chapter 2, verse 12, will know that he is quite right, and I'm not sure there is any amount of exegetical interpretation or demythologising that could lead us to convincingly claim otherwise.
Of course, this is but one example of one verse which does not accord with modern sensibilities. Even if there were many more like it, which I believe there are, one could not step from this to the wholesale rejection of the scripture: but then wholesale rejection of the scripture is not what I wish to advocate. I wish to advocate the rejection of the authority of the Scripture. I don't believe that we should root our faith in the letters of a misogynist and the fragmented accounts of unknown men. Of course, I do not claim there is no truth to be found in the Bible: I simply claim that what truth there is is not enough to justify the Bible's status as the 'the source of all saving truth and moral teaching,' and thus the foundation of Christian faith.
The appeal to reject the authority of the Scripture is far from unprecedented, nor necessarily controversial or original: indeed, it could perhaps be said to follow naturally from the work of Tillich and Bultmann, given certain other assumptions. However, it is still the case that serious doctrinal issues would, and do, arise from such a rejection. There is the question of how we can know the life of Christ with any certainty: there is the question of what exactly we are to found our faith upon instead, such that we might be certain in our beliefs.
My response to these questions is to say that they are not important: as I said last Trinity, I believe that faith is in fact inimical to such certainty as some seek in Scripture. For me the more important question is this: from whence do we actually derive our faith? I want to give an example from my own experience as a possible answer: I once spent two weeks in a bed and breakfast on the Moray Firth. On my last day I was walking along the coast when I decided to sit down and look over the sea. Just as I sat, the Andante of Mahler's 6th came on my iPod and the sun hit that strange angle at which daylight ends and sunset begins. For sixteen perfect minutes I sat in absolute peace, watching the sun descend over the sea.
I believe that it is simply from such subjective experiences of peace, from the very existence of beauty, kindness and love, that we derive our faith. I also believe that that faith is the same faith that forms the pure heart of Christian tradition, the heart that has sustained itself across millennia. It is in this living faith, and not in dusty old tomes, that we find what it means to be Christian, that without which Christianity could not be. I do not believe that Christianity is essentially a collection of dogmatic rituals and creeds (though that is not to say that such rituals and creeds are worthless): I believe that it is the simple acceptance of faith. Perhaps the best elucidation of this belief can be drawn from the fact that faith, like mankind, seeks greater understanding of itself: thus it manifests itself as an active quest for God, the ineffable force that speaks in that still small voice of calm, 'inexplicable and uncanny.' It is through their commitment to this active quest for humanity's 'ultimate concern' that Christians find their identity: as in all walks of life, it is the answers they seek, not the answers they give, that define them.
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