Defending and Objecting to Uniqueness and Finality

The Archbishop of Canterbury gave a sermon in Guildford defending the uniqueness and finality of Christ. Given his power of reasoning, it is something I listened to on the sound file and have tried to summarise. Parts of his delivery when typing (and pausing the sound) were extremely difficult to summarise, and it was no use trying to just reproduce his words as they would not then explain in a way to comprehend them, so I have in those places tried to capture what I think he was saying or would be saying. So here goes, and then comes my response as someone who does not believe in the uniqueness or finality of Christ or, perhaps, anything near the same.

Two texts are familiar: John 14:5 I am the way, truth and life etc., Acts 4: 8 is the name of Jesus Christ etc. is the stone you builders rejected, now the cornerstone and salvation found in no one else.

These are powerful and heavily charged texts: Christian conviction that in Jesus Christ is truth about God and humanity. Not living into this and accepting it has consequences: either the finality of Christ (nothing more to know) or uniqueness. But these are problematic for many today. Not just regarding people of other faiths but also in general about how Christians communicate what they believe and what God is doing. In last 40 years or so the problems of the classical interpretation of text is difficult on 3 bases, objections:

First difficulty is moral. What kind of God is it that makes God dependent on a chancy matter - those who never heard about Jesus, or those who heard but didn't understand or haven't waited to find out, or those before Jesus. A just God is it who punishes people for not being in the right place at the right time?

Political objection: if Christ has finality, doesn't it give a perfect excuse to shut up anyone who says differently. Crusading and colonialism showed contempt towards a large part of the human race, and carried prejudices about the superiority of our culture.

Philosophical objection - every truth is spoken in terms of its own culture and times. Is ane vent in the Middle East 2000 years ago applicable to everyone everywhere? It lifts something out of the level of human conversation and becomes inhuman and unsustainable.

In one form or another these are the objections, what people say: that makes a Christian a bigot, intolerant, exclusive. It sits very badly indeed not just with a plural society but with a liberal and democratic society.

Plural has a plurality of meanings. Not just religious plurality but also of lifestyles, philosophies and options - options the most telling of all. The ideal becomes the choice that makes you comfortable. Truth and finality isn't allowed to arise.

Powerful objections - if to commend faith in this social cultural context.

One could give up on finality of exclusive of Christ. Tackle this Later. Step back a little first to look again at the texts and what is and isn't claimed.

John does NOT say that unless you hold these propositions to be true there is no life for you. Without a vital relationships with Word of God made flesh you will not become what you are made to be - a fullness of human destiny. It is about a unique relationship with Jesus. No one comes to the Father except through me: if you are to be reconciled as a son or daughter with the God that Jesus calls Father then it is in association with Jesus and walking his way, not repeating what he says but following him.

Peter in Acts says that for you to find life and healing you must turn to one who is rejected and despised, and YOU is underlined. So to those who crucified Jesus, in order to be rescued from the trap you put yourself, the name you must draw on is the one you killed.

This is not to evacuate texts of traditional meaning, but to note how both texts challange to change your life. What is the way to the Father? In John the father is discovered (not shown, pointed at). In Acts turn towards the one you've rejected and there you find your hope.

Difficulty is when 1st and 2nd person statements become abstract 3rd person statements. But they do presuppose 3rd person statements of a kind.

Both texts take for granted that we are deprived of the knowledge that leads to life as human beings, locked in patterns of troubled behaviour, and that we need rescue, and we need to be set free. Christians were created to be sons and daughters of the heavenly father. Something about human beings is true universally: our orientation to relate intimately and intensely to the source of all things. That is what we are made for, we are designed for that relationship and we become free in that relationship: free to echo and imitate the self-giving love of that God day by day.

Depends on believing in God, that in God's own self is already that pattern of relationship, in Trinity - clutching on to Christ, held by the Spirit; not in our hands or actions or ideas but in what the eternal Son and Spirit bring about as a gift. This is what the New Testament is claiming.

Not just Christianity in relation to other religions, but true for human beings. Or do people have different destinities? Becoming a child of God is good for some but not for others?

The unfairness is not God deciding if you don't believe then you're out - that moral objection, but unfairness would be in not trying to share the human possibility, or having no access at all to mysterious truth of one's own being. If emphasise trinity rather than human effort, it isn't just the relationship of people to son and father that is going on, but God having revealed himself in Jesus Christ and revealed himself in that action. Those who don't encounter it directly and we can't know how they relate to Jesus and the father.

Political objection also turns around differently. If the action of God is to bring relationship to father, then clearly cultural expressions do not themselves make a difference. And you can't enforce by human power. God does not need protecting by human beings. You can end up being more critical about exercising human power (than the objectors). If there's a living relationship then you will be sceptical about a cultural force to guarantee relationship - because it puts humanity where God belongs.

Philosophically there is not a sacred form of words that tells all Christians what they need to know, but rather to say about something in human nature that is absolute: we don't in fact have a complete relativism. We don't say all right to racism to torture and to tolerate them. We assume ethical similarity whatever cultural differences.

Ultimately there is coherence and convergence: are humans so different that what is right is for some but not others? That's what happens if you let go of finiteness and uniqueness. What constitutes full humanity varies in the world? - we ought to be uncomfortable about that. Talking of the nature of God and Jesus Christ is also talking about humanity made in the divine image. Uniqueness and finality is then because in Jesus Christ a new phase in entire human history is opened: a community represents on earth a new creation, a restored humanity. Now on earth a community proclaims God's will for universal reconciliation and God's presence leading us newly to full humanity. That happens from life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Uniqueness: yes, a new historical epoch and moment can only happen because of the one event of the narratives around it. Finality: Christians claimed and will still that when God calls you as simply a human being into relationship of intimacy (enjoyed by Jesus in an eternal intimacy in the moments and persons of the being of God) then you understand something about God that cannot be replaced or supplemented - as if just an interesting theory about God and humanity.

Christians claim a destiny and dignity for all human beings; in relationship with Jesus, the Word made flesh that is fully real.

This possibly answers moral, political and philosophical questions. If we say less than a claimed uniqueness and finality then the questions are equally serious and difficult - giving different destinies for different human beings. Finality of Jesus is finality of human beings, reconciled, a universal fellowship?

Are there problems in finality and uniqueness for dialogue and learning, making for intolerance? Are all others going to hell? In true dialogue Christians expect to learn, to become different from the encounter, even if not to change Christian minds. There is conviction and confidence. The confidence allows learning (but not change convictions).

When alongside, Christians expect to see in Jew, Buddhist and Hindu (etc.) humanity something that challenges and enlarges the Christian - a gift from their humanity. Famous statement in the Qur'an that says God did not elect to make everyone the same; so God makes us to learn in dialogue. To learn from others is not to compromise: infininte truth in F S& HS cannot be exhausted; one can come from dialogue as confident as before about the Trinity and Jesus's finality. Yet discipleship is enriched.

A good dialogue between faiths is to see what another face looks like when turned to God, because something is realised in that encounter. Does belief in uniqueness and finality mean no hope for the other?

Christians are reluctant sometimes to leave things to God, as if God hasn't read the proper books, and to be protective to God. Speaking for himself Rowan Williams will let God be the judge as to how much the faith outsider has turned to Jesus or the Father. A Christlike aura of a life might be there for a person who's atheist, agnostic, Muslim...

Gavin D'Costa says how you can encounter with an outsider something so central to the gospel you are trying to communicate. You then pray that that demonstrated relationship is what it seems to be. Jesus doesn't demand a precise profession of what you mean, but his presence changes life. Some do recognise and some don't; something changed among the lepers from an encounter with Jesus. This all needs some hard thinking and hard silence, and not to be premature.

Belief in uniqueness and finality (for all the assaults on it today) remains a way of speaking about hope regarding the entire human family. Christians should be suspicious of bullying and an inhuman attack on those of other faiths. God save us from that, but also God save us from nervousness about our own convictions, that humans find their peace in Jesus and that destinies and dignity converge and destiny is found. The root is in that conviction that there is no boundary around Jesus. What he says, does and suffers is liberatingly relevant to every human - past, present, future.

There is a need to reconnect Christology, the Trinity and anthropology. Jesus as unique and final allows us to do that. It allows a generous desire to share and a humble desire to learn with the other and patience to let God work out his purpose.

So there are three core objections people like me make. But there are not. They - the moral, political and philosophical - are objections about consequences. The first two objections are actually historical and scientific. Firstly, the objection is that history and its methods does not allow us to say that these crucially and critical events happened: a coming from God (in whatever sense), a life lived as God on earth, and the demonstrable signs of that (not proofs - not miracles as proofs but signs) and the uniqueness of a killing and especially the miracle of a transformed body that was actually Jesus that made his body and presence what matters, as much as his teachings. And even if there can be an overcoming of the historical method objection, there is the scientific objection: that these miracles as signs, including the big one of resurrection, cannot and did not happen. The texts that say otherwise are culturally derived, about a people who believed all manner of things, generations after, who placed these concepts in their other concepts about a world coming to an end and about their future.

Now the Archbishop asserts but doesn't discuss this, but instead discusses a relationship - one that he identifies in the Godhead, which is pure belief, but which allows for a pure realised humanity and a community that can claim this humanity and apparently demonstrate it. This relationship he supposes is ethical, which raises the question about ethics and lived lives. Well, it is the other way around - it is the lived life ethical - if we can imagine it (and again we don't know Jesus has this any more than anyone else, known or unknown) that then allows a God-projection. We just do not know enough to claim this uniqueness, but even if we do it becomes a mistake to focus on the person, the being, rather than the relationship. If it is about relationship, then it is about an actual, earthly relationship, and not some platonic projection that is superfluous to an actual relationship imagined. See, if it is about humanity, then it must always come back down to humanity.

Of course there are moral, political and philosophical objections, and Christians can tackle these as they wish. But I haven't even got to them. Neither has, say, Jim Al-Khalili. And here is a more critical philosophical objection: if, like me, you understand life as emerging according to evolution, then the very being of humanity is itself an accident, a coming about. Now it may all be potential realised, if we suppose consciousness is less varied than embodied forms, though there may be more and indeed other potential yet to be seen. So, then, relationship becomes about embodied consciousness, one to another, and about avoiding pain in the other and striving for fulfilment in reciprocal arrangements. This is the point of liberty and democracy. And what fulfils may indeed differ and vary: why should fulfilment have a pure form in the heavens? Again, it is superfluous to what is, and what has come about through the local, the chance, the environmental.

My approach to religion then must be against such Platonism implicit in the Archbishop's address, against that need for one and need for uniqueness and finality. It is about our accidental coming about, and, yet, here we are, then, about our indeed qualities-of-relationships as conscious and embodied humans, and the reflection upon these. We can draw on religious myths for the work of thinking again and acting better, but they serve us and not we them. Do it that way and the objections fall away, including those that object when there is a lack of uniqueness and finality (which depend on beliefs that are anti-evolutionary, anti-scientific and suppose more about history than can be demonstrated). The objection to the objection is that there is no pure form to goodness, because goodness has to be in situation, and may never be free of qualification, and it varies. And as soon as it varies, that oneness is gone. That's life: life in its fullness is therefore life that is strived for and difficult, and the Christian myth says something about that, like an insight. But that is what it is: a limited insight.

Verbose Governance

Just what is it about evangelicals and verbosity? Students have asked me, "How many words should this essay be?" My answer has been the question, "How many words does it take with sufficient relevant detail to answer the question?"

There is something about the Anglican Communion Institute and now the ACNA based American Anglican Council that wants to write a lot to give the appearance of gravitas. The Rev. Prof. Stephen Noll, Vice Chancellor of the Uganda Christian University has written about Communion Governance. He has done it in a 'History of the world from year dot' approach, as if every time there needs to be an argument about the Covenant the whole sordid history of the institutional manoeuvres needs retelling all over again. We know them, or can find out. So let's cut to the chase.

Following the resignation (but will still be around) of Mouneer Anis from the Standing Committee and the rapidly followed up enormous essay of the ACI, to try and 'shenanigan' (a verb I've just invented) a new Covenant-signers only Standing Committee into being, Stephen Noll has now changed his mind about his own recommended rush for Global South Anglican Churches to sign on to the Covenant. He now wants tactics to fit in more with the ACI schemers, but in fact goes further to say that there should only be a one track Communion, that is made up from signatories who sign up in spirit and letter to the Covenant as a disciplining document along with these changes:

1. Replace references to "The Standing Committee" in section 4 with "Primates of churches that have adopted the Covenant."
2. Change the wording of section 4.1.4 to read: "Every Church of the Anglican Communion is expected [instead of "invited"] to enter into this Covenant according to its own constitutional procedures.

The trouble is, this goes exactly against that video statement made by the Archbishop of Canterbury, that this is precisely not what the latest draft of the Covenant is supposed to be about.

So the question is, is the Covenant to be about what Noll wants or what the Archbishop wants? Who will succeed in defining the Covenant? The problem is, once a Covenant is accepted it becomes a 'thing' subject to manipulation. It becomes a football to kick. Anis, the ACI and now Noll may get their way, or perhaps the Archbishop can do another Lambeth 2008 control job or Jamaica ACC blinder (by switching arguments and leaving everyone utterly confused). It's a bit risky though. If there is no Covenant, then Anglicanism continues as before, with nothing to focus upon. Of course ACNA, GAFCON and the ACI need the political football to come into being in order to kick it their way (or they have to play on another created pitch - failure then is disastrous). The Archbishop may be a better dribbler and goal scorer than all of them, but is it worth the risk, and is it worth two tracks of insiders and outsiders as has been the Archbishop's previous argument (if it is previous - you see, he's so good with the dribbling the ball that like with a Quantum Weevil you've either no idea where he is or no idea where he is going!).

Oh what fun with the ongoing Anglican Wars, and how destructive they remain.

Eating Without Jesus

Talking about bishops, the House of Lords and privilege, and Dave Walker's view of what bishops were doing whilst civil partnerships in church were being voted on, the Bishop of Lincoln used his own diocesan rag Crosslincs to describe his recent busy experience of eating. I reproduce it further below.

Meanwhile, the relevant reading is as follows (Bishops' Matthew 14:13–21):

14:13 Now when the Bishop heard this, he withdrew from ordinary life using a taxi to a privileged place to be with others. But when the crowds heard it in Crosslincs, they were elsewhere and disappointed. 14 When he went in the restaurants, each time he saw a small number of the great and good; and he related to them and saliva was readily produced. 15 Once when it was evening, two suffragan bishops came to him and they said to him, 'This is a deserted place, and the hour is what it is; we can send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and towns and buy food for themselves.' 16 The bishop said to them, 'What a good idea, I am busy.' 17 They replied, 'Bye. You seem to have plenty.' 18 And he said, 'See you later.' 19 Then the chefs came in with even more platefuls for the select company. Taking the concoction made from five thousand loaves and two thousand fish, they looked up to heaven, and thanked God for their privileges, and were served the beautiful meals by the workers, and ate amongst themselves. 20 And the few ate and were well filled; and they left quite a lot, which went into the restaurant bins: broken pieces and twelve baskets full. 21 And those who ate were five with no women or children.

Below is John Saxbee's own account from Crosslincs (Best way to get it and avoid fighting the awful Mortons Digital reading technology is to click on Save above and download as a .PDF and then read it from within something like PDF X-Change.):

Eating for Jesus John Saxbee Bishop of Lincoln

This is how a leading Churchman once described his life of lurching from one lunch or dinner to another in the course of his duties – he was eating for Jesus!

It was a bit like that for me during the recent meeting of General Synod in London.

Monday lunch: Lambeth Palace with the Archbishop of Canterbury to discuss how we might forward debates within the Church of England about human sexuality.

Monday dinner: Lambeth Palace during which I had to justify why I was a suitable person to be numbered among a select company of Nobody’s Friends.

This arcane body was formed to remember a man who habitually described himself as a nobody. When he died, his colleagues and acquaintances formed a sort of dining club called Nobody’s Friends and people nominated to join the club must make a self-deprecating speech justifying their claim to membership. This proved quite easy for me as I have a great deal to be self-deprecating about!

Tuesday lunch: Church House, Westminster, to Chair a lunch time Fringe Meeting for Synod members wanting to know more about a Board of Education Report on work with children and young people being debated later in the week.

Tuesday dinner: Shepherd’s Restaurant in Marsham Street with the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor to discuss his Christian witness through his work at the Museum and with the media. It was a joy and privilege to share on a one-to-one basis with such a gifted and generous Christian gentleman.

Wednesday lunch: House of Lords Dining Room with our Lincoln Diocesan General Synod representatives to thank them for their work on our behalf during this quinquennium of Synod Sessions. We toured the Houses of Parliament and heard Lord Winston deliver a brilliant speech in the House of Lords on the human genome project.

Wednesday dinner: Bau Bau Vietnamese Restaurant, Percy Street to meet with members of my Episcopal Cell Group – a group of five Bishops, we were formed in 1994 when we were Consecrated, and we have been meeting regularly ever since for prayer, study, mutual support and, of course, the occasional meal in exotic locations.

Thursday lunch: House of Lords Cafeteria with a former colleague from my Exeter days to discuss his future – and catch up on a bit of ecclesiastical gossip!

Thursday dinner: Mansion House with the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City of London, who host the Archbishops and Bishops of the Church of England every other year. Seating is on the basis of length of time in Episcopal Orders. I found myself on the top table for the first time – and began to feel quite old!

Friday lunch: A British Rail sandwich … It’s a hard life, but someone has to do it.

A Good Garage

I'm going to advertise Castledyke Sales, a garage in Barton-upon-Humber that gets recommended by word of mouth and was to me some years ago. It is reliable, honest and not expensive and when you get a garage like that you hang on to it.

The Amendment Day

Update: the result.

Entry as was:

Today is the day of the amendment that if passed will allow liberal religious communities to have one ceremony with registration of same sex couples. The amendment, however, seeks a spot where the actual signing is non-religious, presumably by everyone keeping quiet at that moment. It is another compromise, and that's the answer to Andrew Goddard's own attempt to justify imposing restrictions on others. And according to Colin Coward, the Bishop of Leicester will offer no assistance towards religious freedom in his privilege of legislating.

British law is passed according to muddle and compromise, and gets changed according to acceptance. So law is not just about intention, but also about use. I remember teaching and being told by students over and again that Civil Partnership means marriage. In that it has become that equivalence, then laws get passed that move in that direction. Sometimes a law is passed with one intention, operates according to other intentions, it becomes clear that such development has disapproval, and laws get passed again to make the intention (approved of) active and not the consequence.

Something that was once acceptable also can become unacceptable. For example, Bishops voting in the House of Lords was at once time part of the feudal system that the House of Lords represents. It is being altered according to muddle, but it is getting more unacceptable that bishops should be voting on national legislation. So a law needs passing to remove them.

Below is a photograph from my wedding that represents a signing of the registrar. A friend used my camera to take photographs, and they were a bit hit and miss. A bit of a miss and a bit of a hit is the chap at the far right. He was the registrar.


He sat in the vestry while my marriage service (I wrote it) moved along and he heard us say important words to each other. That meant the document could be signed. This photograph is a fake as the document had already been signed. The table was put there and photos taken. The minister was not a registrar because the church had very few weddings and he did very few.

Imagine if Elena sat there was a bloke. Presumably, according to the amendment, the religious business will have come to a halt, the registrar would have been called in (can he sit at the back?) and then documents signed. He won't have listened for any magic words, and in a condition of religious silence the document will be completed. He then can leave (unless he wants a cup of tea) and go. People might then say religious things again. Thus the service would not have the magic words, or if it did he would not have been waiting to hear them nor would they make any difference.

In the end there will have to be magic words marriage for same sex and both sexes, and partnership with no magic words for same sex and both sexes, and each become what they are. But that is for the future, as the muddle settles down. Clearly churches will have to decide what they want to accept as regards their sacred rites.

An Answer to McGrath

Despite leaving the discussions of Fulcrum I can still see what arguments it is presenting, and it has reproduced what might be seen as a core argument against the liberal position, at least that liberal position as most clearly seen inside the Church of England. The book it comes from is quite old, apparently, but presumably it is being seen as having some bite in the present developments of the Church of England - certainly, in its hierarchy, of what might be called The Silence of the Liberals!

It just seems to me that the argument presented by Alister McGrath - 'The Confession of a Disillusioned Liberal' - in his opening chapter of what is titled at Fulcrum Why Doctrine? runs on a number of claims that need some examination at least. [Update: Attempts here to find the supposed original book have been removed - information on its origins in 1993 is given here.]

The first point to make about doctrine is that it is not the result of individual reasoning, his or any other. He might arrive at views that equate with a given doctrine, but doctrine is a collective 'before' stance for a member of a doctrinally managed group prior to any reasoning. It is the guideposts of the group, and placed there because it is believed to be necessary.

If a point arrived in history, as it did characteristically in the nineteenth century, when doctrine is severely questioned, it is because there is a gap between what people think and what the doctrine insists upon. What happened in the later nineteenth century was that Anglican academics, with a look over their shoulder to Unitarians, were aware of the growing gap between the growing disciplines of knowledge in the university and their own theological enterprise as suggested by doctrine.

That gap has since become much wider, and means that a Christianity that engages with these worldly disciplines is prone to wander off the historical straight and narrow as doctrine had defined it. As it does so, and is seen to be self-undermining of the tradition, the argument is made again about the sureness of putting doctrine first.

The Oxford liberals of 1860 were deemed unacceptable, but Charles Gore of Lux Mundi and 1899 was actually a compromise of the liberal position and a strident Anglo-Catholicism before them, where a re-insistence on Jesus's divinity was combined with a kind of worldly sacramentalism along with a compromise with ongoing intellectual thought. It is the foundation for much liberal Catholicism today, and that against which McGrath once rebelled, despite his use of Gore. Of course, some liberal Catholicism can be a combination of some very liberal views and a lot of liturgical dressing up and mythic theatre, but the point here is that much of Anglican Catholic liberality is based around Gore and a later ongoing ability to trade off more minor doctrines and miracles while keeping the big ticket declarations.

There is, of course, another approach, if related, which is that of the narrative. This isn't so much a trade off, but the maintenance of Christianity as a 'story' while the rest of the world reasons in a different way. It even appears to be conservative and faithful. The story, maintained more or less in full, then 'delivers' its insights and ethical goodies. Some, like Rowan Williams, go so deeply and detailed into the story that it starts to look like raking over bits of history, whereas others may go for a kind of large scale Christian platonism, all within the bubble. For them, doctrine is the story book: it provides the page titles and the text, sometimes all of the text. A Rowan Williams will say that, for example, the Virgin Birth was not important once for him but its importance has since increased for him. You see the sleight of hand, here, and there is a kind of deception involved. Another variation (on this) is to know perfectly well that the whole virginal conception business rests on a Greek mistranslation, and to say so in any biblical study, and then to go on offering prayers to the Virgin Mary in good Catholic form. It is a contradiction a liberal is going to point out.

That's what defines a liberal. It is not someone who doubts a bit of this or that. It is someone who says, look, this is a gap, if there is a gap, and if you think this but say that then there is a falsehood involved. Tell your story if you like, but do explain how one thing matches the other or doesn't. The liberal can be a pain for someone who has Christianity as a resource book or some sort of personal discipline. Fine, but a liberal never stops asking "Why?"

Christianity without doctrine is not a denial of the issue of truth or a denial of truth. The issue of truth is there all the time. It is that Christianity doesn't match up to the demand for truth as it has been developing across the disciplines. It is that Christianity is dislodged, and doctrine becomes one large sticking plaster for a crisis situation. So why have doctrine?

Because, of course, if Christianity is like the other disciplines then it becomes necessarily contingent and relative. That, presumably, won't do - or won't for Alister McGrath. All disciplines are like that: they are open to change. So if Christianity asks for help from history, it realises that history is a careful discipline that has rules that, when applied to Christianity, shows a Jesus who is a strange, distant, and largely unknown figure, one who might be an exemplarist from the received texts, but beyond which little can be said. Again, apply philosophy to Christianity, and you uncover the imposition of Greek Platonism. Remove or replace that, and Christianity becomes far more relativistic.

McGrath wants neither the relevance of a 'useful story' nor the relativity of a Christianity amongst the disciplines. He needs something that has to be true. For me, truth has to be established; doctrine is a short cut for truth, because it is a laying down in detail of apparent foundations that declare themselves true. Often doctrine is about what you want to be the case rather than what you can establish: it involves a leap across a gap.

But all having doctrine does is take one back to a position where the liberals started from, where the gap exists, unless one is going to declare living in the Christianised bubble (like the Radical Orthodox do in their Christian Platonist separation). The only other position, a realist insistence on objective doctrine of truth, involves a kind of violence on to the rest of the world and its thought forms (actually, so does the narrative Radical Orthodox, though they claim no worldly objectivity for their Church of pure peace).

From such an objectivist stance we end up, unsurprisingly, with a lot of loudly stated, aggressive even, biblical quotations, laying down the rules, laying down a privilege of knowledge.

It then becomes a 'Whose side are you on?' and very macho. It becomes about obedience and, as McGrath puts it, who to obey, as if anyone should be obeyed.

The notion is that obedience to another than this world gives a Church some backbone against the culture in which it finds itself. But why should this be so, if a Church has regularly committed itself to ethical values of compassion and service that it has discovered in its, yes, relative engagement with its and other traditions in the setting of varieties of knowledge? To reflect and contemplate, as in worship and meditation, and to do so in full relationship with a culture, is not the same as accepting that culture in all of its ways and activities. Liberal Churches do not worship greed simply because Western society uses it (though, I notice some doctrinal charismatic churches operating an apparent biblical prosperity theology).

The argument, rather, is that the Church should engage with the world, and that's what gives it contact and relationship, and then to say there are ethical bases that we have to discuss that are surely better for a communal humanity and our relationship with the natural world.

Common human experience is important: after all it is the difficulty of human experience that gives rise to a call to stop, to think again, to do something differently, and to offer the new suggestion outwards.

McGrath's need for otherness then comes down to the question of Christ. He's right that Christ over the others as 'the best moral teacher' doesn't work, though it doesn't work because there isn't the historical information, and also why should any human embody what is best in a consistent manner - and, if anyone has done, why should we know about them? There are going to be many worthy ethical people who have lived and expressed their stance quietly and about whom we rightly know nothing at all. Equally, many a person has made a great deal of their position, and we might know about them, but doesn't mean we should take any notice.

The problem with turning Jesus into an authority is that it is actually a Jesus and Paul show, an early Christian community show. It is credible that in his sayings Jesus was pointing away from himself to the belief he had in a God who acts and was going to do so very quickly. Like other healers and preachers of his time, who also culturally mixed healing, an ethical stance and the world of demons, he thus acted as an active agent of God, healing and declaring sinlessness so that the person could be ready for the coming Kingdom of God about to be realised. His tradition was that of the suffering servant Jew, mixed with the immediacy of the time, with a Messiah coming.

None of this points to doctrines. It points to the fact that here was yet another fallible human being, wrong about his cosmology (the world wasn't going to end) and as much trapped in his culture (demons, sin equals ill-health and death) as any earth dweller. Indeed he focused upon his own tribe, and the missing tribes that would return. Thus he had twelve disciples (and, apparently, made another mistake regarding one of them).

Indeed, it is the Western world of now that has made the greatest strides (though the ancient Greeks tried) to break out from the limitations of culture. The fact that we now cannot reason chains back to origins - because like leads to unalike, the fact that we have quantum discoveries and relativity on a large scale, and that these deliver in maths and in experiment (and are thus sustainable) are arguably anti-cultural. Yes, a culture of money drives them, and much is missed and interests develop, but they still repeat and deliver. Whereas Jesus was simply lost in his own culture, but able through human experience and through that culture to make some ethical stances at least. Good - but these are open to reasoning.

McGrath says:

Yet if we allow that Jesus has authority simply because he echoes what we happen to believe to be right, we are setting ourselves above him in judgement. It is our own concepts of morality, our own standards (wherever they come from) that are judging him.

Indeed so, in that he derived these standards; so did the Buddha 500 years before him, and Zoroaster, and also many unknown, and others created ethics of cruelty and evident destruction like the (mixed up) Romans and like Hitler. Of course discussion and debate are going to apply concepts of morality to Jesus, just as to any one else making this claim or that. We condemn Hitler by sheer experience of cruelty, not due to doctrine.

What is derived ethically and lived ethically still allows for transformations. Buddha says, "Suck it and see," and also, "If the raft is not needed, stop using it." The fact that we generate constructive ethics doesn't prevent them transforming us.

McGrath also says:

Christianity does not assert that Christ has authority on account of the excellence or acceptability of his teaching; rather, the teaching of Christ has authority and validity on account of who he is - God incarnate. The object of Christian faith is not the teachings, but the teacher.

Quite so for Christianity the Religion, that it is after Paul and the early Christian communities, producing the 'cult of the person'. Instead of focussing on what matters: how we go on to live, how we go on to deal with our fellow human beings and animal life, how we develop compassion and the good, it turns the whole thing into a person cult. I mean 'cult' without derogatory undertones, and also avoiding 'cult of personality', though the generation of these by national leaders themselves has usually been of a fictional personality. Here, regarding Jesus, it is that his person, his being, is the object, so personality might not be quite right. But then, of course, Christianity contradicts itself (as it often does) as prayer is supposed to go through Jesus Christ, the one Paul set up as the sole route to salvation, God's sole worker to earth. (And all without meeting the actual person: imagine Paul as Saul in Jerusalem when Jesus was executed, not having any interest in the 'yet another foreign occupation State death' event at Passover in order to bully the locals.)

In the end, though, what is at issue is not saving the place of Jesus, who can stand up for himself, but saving Christianity. The commentaries of Gore and Temple and the rest are all about keeping Christianity as a self-resourced, dominant, hierarchical religion. They are all about the worry that, if the rope is cut, all the institutional apparatus starts to fall apart.

There is another argument, that the sort of liberal presentation here is a kind of doctrine of its own. Well, it has presuppositions about the capability of humans. It simply states that we are pretty much all alike, and there are no privileged offerings from heaven. Social Anthropology made this point clearly, that primitive people are as capable as Western people, and there is no biological blockage to what and how we all understand. But that declaration, that non-doctrine, came about as a result of reseach - and why it is nonsense when Radical Orthodoxy tries to call Sociology 'secular theology'. No it isn't because it uses research. Very important, research, and it has important rules of procedure (sociology has qualitative and quantitative, and understands the limitations too).

So the doctrines of liberalism are not equivalent to the doctrines of orthodox Christianity. One is allowed to develop, to be corrected, and to bubble up from below, whereas the other is a start that determines the finish, and is, frankly, bogus as a method of knowledge.

As for pastoral sensitivities, well we of course like to treat people nicely, but in the end religion should be about coming to terms with death, not trying to prolong life in an imaginary sense. Who knows about consciousness - of course - but that is an unknown. Actually, many people prefer to have the issue of their coming end straight, and then in illness be prepared. A last breath should be a peaceful breath - an amen, the end.

Doctrines were created through the politics of institutional religion, and came with the idea that you set up a truth and the highest truth was unchanging. That is not so any longer, and if doctrines are the bones for a body then they are brittle and misdesigned. A body that works best is a flexible body, where it evolves how it evolves. Strength, as evolution shows, comes in flexibility, in adaptation to change. If Christianity is declining in the West, there are good reasons, and the clamour for doctrine is simply the arguments of those inside it worried that the bones are indeed brittle.

Inside a Chapel

The National Unitarian Fellowship has the function of reaching out to people who are too far from a nearest Unitarian chapel or who don't wish to attend the nearest chapel or chapels. A video has been put out of worship on 20th February at Great Hucklow in Derbyshire where Unitarians meet at their own Nightingale Centre. NUF people may want to view this.

It was edited quickly, and the worship was put together by individual contributions rather than as a more coherent service as would be put together by an individual. There was also no rehearsal. Apparently it is one done of two to edit. I can't say I recognise many in the short video, and whilst I might mumble about content (because it doesn't have coherence) I think they might have combined some inside sound with outside filming - the location is lost for those who don't know the setting.

Anyway, if you are puzzled by the strange art work from the 1990s, take a close look at the features and the photo (from the 1980s!) at the bottom of the Great Hucklow chapel. Yes, I've been on an extended photos search and discovered some peculiar archives!