On the Buses

Stan and Jack come on foot alongside the bus to its front, and Inspector Blake comes out from his office to meet them arriving.

Blakey: Butler, where've you been? 10 minutes ago you should've been here and got that bus aht. You know Butler, I been praying that you would, just one day, just one day Butler, get that bus aht on time.
Stan: Well you ain't goin' to get your prayers answered this time, Blakey.
Blakey: Look Butler, it's not beyond the wit of even you to drive this bus aht through there and, what's more, just one day, before you die, do it on time!
Jack: 'Fraid not [opening his trade union rule book]. We can't go out in that. You see, it says 'ere, the members here cannot be expected to carry out orders from the management that offend members of the travelling public.
Blakey: Members of the travelling public? I know your driving, Butler, offends members of the travelling public, but it's never been a reason for you not to take the bus aht at all. What are you goin' on abaht?
Stan: That - up there. [Points to slogan on the side of the bus: 'THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.']
Blakey: That's no reason not to get the bus aht! You get that bus OUT Butler, and you get on the back and start taking some fares. Look the public probably agree with that anyway. It's not offending anyone.
Stan: This bus goes to the cemetery gates.
Blakey: What's that got to do with it?
Jack: It offends them.
Blakey: It offends them? Oo?
Jack: Them lot in that cemetery.
Blakey: In the cemetery? Behind the cemetery gates? They're dead! I know you might not be able to tell the difference Butler, the way your passengers end up, but them in that cemetery they ain't goin' be offended by any notice on the sides o' these buses.
Stan: It means they're not going to 'eaven, doan it Jack.
Jack: And that offends the members of the travelling public.
Blakey: Travelling public? Yuh. I suppose that's ow you see it. Yuh, I suppose they are in your eyes. The average speed you go, I bet they get wherever you're going first. Well let me tell you, you get that bus aht now - the pair o' yeh - or you won't have any pension coming to get a gravestone between yeh behind them cemetery gates; so you just get that bus there an' sharpish.
Stan: Oh come on Jack, we'd better, or he'll go on like this and ah'll end up there earlier than I should from all the stress he causes. I get enough from Olive an' Arthur.
Jack: OK Stan, only PROBABLY get there earlier though.
Stan: Yeh. Aye. Tell you what, Blakey. Nah, you stop worrying and enjoy your life. Like it says up there, like Jack and me try to do.
Blakey: I 'ate you Butler.

What Religion Isn't

Here is a debate that has come to the surface on Thinking Anglicans in this year of celebrating Darwin. It came thanks to Meg Gilley reflecting on Epiphany, the display of God, the universal God thanks to the story of gifts from afar. She then went on saying:

But of course, Jesus is made known in so many other stories, in the lives of the apostles and other saints, in the gifts and kindnesses of humble folk, in the pursuit of justice and reconciliation, every time we present the word made flesh, every time we follow the way in faithfulness, proclaim the truth and reveal the light. For example, in 2009 falls the 200th anniversary of the birth of Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. There is an extensive programme this year to celebrate Darwin, including a series on BBC Radio 4 this week. I would argue that the search for scientific truth reveals Jesus, the Logos at the heart of creation, in whom all truth resides.

I reacted quite strongly, to say the least, because the search for scientific truth, of which Darwin is one of the iconic persons, does not uncover this. It uncovers ourselves as accidental, thanks to a big rock from outer space and climactic events: indeed not only are mammals huge on the earth but we, homo sapiens, are the last human species of many, either having been better adapted environmentally or killers of other human species.

Here we are with telescopes and particle colliders and various observations and experiments looking at who we are and where we have come from, realising that we are but marginal creatures on the edge of a galaxy and of many galaxies.

Nevertheless we last humans have much to discover about consciousness and pain and pleasure, and how we operate socially and ethically to ourselves and the other creatures that have some sense of self-existence.

What science will never reveal is another language game of a mythology: a mythology that says there is a God a Father who either always was too a Son, or created a Son, and consisted of a Holy Spirit too that was involved in creating all this universe for which a particular person, a Jewish rabbi, is the very God. This is the language of myth, and is not a causal truth in the sense that the sciences and even social sciences show causal truths.

The importance of religion is this: that in becoming conscious and self-conscious, and in being tribal, we have attachments that need managing and manifestations of consciousness that usefully need directing - that love of self and other, and under-love and over-love, as it emerges.

Religion handles these issues by dealing in forms of love, ethics, and relationships. It creates heavens, gods, patriarchs and prophets and histories and ways that facilitate working out these issues: inadequacies towards becoming adequate and even acceptance (salvation). It has ways to follow: correct ways from incorrect ways. It deals in pollution and in purity. It ritualises exchange between us as people and see that there is something of the gift in life, the spiritual reward from a material offering that binds us as collective (and sometimes separates out).

Religion deals with these in sophisticated ways that we can do well to analyse, though an argument exists that by analysing how religion works is a bit like knowing how a magician does the magic trick. In other words the people who get most out of religion are those who marvel in the appearance of the trick and treat it literally as it appears.

There is some truth in this: however, as moderns, and after moderns, as those who cannot ignore the secular, the scientific, the social scientific, and can still enjoy art, we still marvel at the skill of the magician from behind.

The problem is that mainline Christianity in particular is so realist about a God released into history in human form that it never shakes off its conflict with science. It is not enough for incarnation to be attitudinal (positive) about the temporary material world in which we have temporary residence. It is not enough to see Christianity as a mythology doing what it does as a religion, in that sciences and social sciences do what they do as causal explanations.

Christianity often says: humm, the Genesis story is mythological; the Abraham story may not have any history, there may have been someone like Moses, there was exile in Babylon that framed Jewish myths, that the prophets came before the Law, and there were various Jewish persons and stories including its prophetic people; and that Christianity relates to these, in that the New Testament was written looking backwards in order to look immediately forwards, that the birth narratives are likely fictional, and much else is early-Church reconstructed (for Rabbi Jesus as Messiah and then as Gentile Christ) and that the biblical Canon had to be chosen for orthodoxy from the varieties of interpretation, and tradition worked out complex theologies and traditions attacked variations and found themselves living with variations through the ages.

Yet, despite all that relativity, Christianity suddenly wants to jump in and claim something already set up and pre-planned in a hugely realist sense. It stamps over the ground that science occupies. It absolutises theology and liturgy on very shaky grounds.

Let's be clear. Evolution is local and particular. It responds to one environment it is in, and rate of change relates to the intensity of the environment on the varieties of life forms. Each change gives rise to the next. In this there is no plan. We humans are accidents: every single one. The asteroid hits and the environment shifts; so with climate. Life then is devastated, and the unfit few become the next fittest and develop. Otherwise, unless on resource strained islands (of all kinds), expect tiny changes (but appearing quite large over larger time scales).

Same with the universe. If it goes bang and is unsustainable, it will collapse. This universe didn't. What is the chance of a pack of cards being laid out in a particular order? The same as any other particular order, but we always look back from where we are. So we just discover our universe: one that will become ever more distant and completely lifeless in the far far future, where time may just groan to an endless pause and be unexperienced by any subjective entity. This universe is not friendly: we humans here are lucky, for a while, and we will be extinct probably even before our Sun gives up.

This is the sort of thing science finds. Religion is something other, about already intelligent conscious beings in reflection (and I include here animal life: I contend that animals have a spirituality of wonder and relationship too).

Of course there may be transcendent 'deity' in that, in some deeper, grounded sense, perhaps related to consciousness, or perhaps in only signals of transcendence from all we construct and observe: but such a transcendence is not something that sends Sons of God or even, for that matter, ready worked out texts in languages (that we homo-sapiens can write down and store) to privileged prophets.

Such transcendence may even have some sort of scientific backing, in any dimensions beyond the four, or in quantum particle life, or even in the mathematics of simplistic beauty - the sort we see in simple repeat maths with virtual numbers that produce the shapes of nature. But this still does not end up demonstrating the particularity of mythologies that are complex structures from our cultural past, that deal in human individual attachments and collectivities and process the wonder we generate.

Unitarian Drift: Identification

What would a Unitarian drift Anglican Church look like?

Theologically it would be one that required no doctrinal promises or commitments of its clergy and lay leaders or such minimal promises (say to "faithfulness of the tradition") that interpretation could become highly diverse without a sufficient centre of gravity towards a trinitarian with Pauline salvation faith.

It may well be following Jesus but in a more rational and post Darwinian sense: that he is an off-centred human just like the rest of us when it comes to the chancy way of the universe. It would be interested in his ethics and context rather than some supernatural development in a tradition that delivers salvation by belief in Jesus as the Christ.

Early Unitarian belief, that Jesus was God's sole salvation authority figure by the will of God - a man given the power to do miracles and was resurrected by God - would be today splitting hairs. This belief in Unitarian days was related to Word, to the actions of the Spirit and to the fatherhood of God. These days we cannot tell this apart from Trinitarianism: these days Unitarian or even Arian beliefs are expressed often with the will to be trinitarian. But even if they are not, the expressions are too close, not (as they once were) too far apart.

Unitarian drift could still include the vastness of God and the working of the Spirit to bring the new from the old, but the Jesus as an indicator of the ethical nature of God would be just one example, not the core.

The Bible is something particular about something general. Once for the Karl Barths and near, the particular was what mattered, but a Unitarian drift is that the general matters and the particular is open to the full range of critical techniques in trying to understand what faith and trust means, and how to practice.

Liturgically a Unitarian drift would be a change towards frequent revision of liturgies rather than trying to fix with one over a long period (revision does not include correction according to fidelity to tradition), and would include clear theological change. Choices of liturgies would come in. There may be relaxation away insome cases from liturgies altogether (in England this seems to be something evangelicals and charismatics do, rather than liberals). Up to now litugical revision seems to be about changing language and about a different stress on Eucharists, as well as accuracy to ecumenical tradition.

No Anglican Church on either account seems to have a Unitarian drift. Of course there are revisionist theologies and people who half believe this and that and believe lots of other, and no doubt many could write different liturgies. But leaders give promises to the tradition and to using particular forms of worship. These promises would either have to end or become something understood in a different way (that the worship allowed was accepted as varied in content that a promise did not actually mean anything specific).

Remember this would be Unitarian drift: not Unitarian. Unitarians have readings that come from the Bible and other sources, and prayers that range from contemplations and meditations through to prayers to a listening being. Unitarians have services with Buddhist, Pagan, secular (say art or science) as well as Christian origin themes, and few services today follow a fixed liturgy or even choices (though some churches produce their own).

Now it would be expected that the non-drifting Christian Church has interfaith services where Christianity is represented in a fairly conserved way. Of course, if a church has many such services without invitations to representatives of other faiths, then it might be said that other things are going on - akin to a Unitarian drift (or Universalist drift, on a more modern understanding of Universalist). But the odd service in a community of different faiths is evidence of nothing.

A Church (denomination) with a Unitarian drift can still have bishops and the synodical structure. However, if those bishops were becoming understood as superintendents, and if a belief in apostolic succession was being dropped quietly, then this might indicate Unitarian drift (Unitarianism proper has two bishops), though probably with other theological and liturgical developments.

There are all sorts of laypeople, clergy and even bishops who have views compatible with the above, but they do not form a movement for change: even the Modern Churchpeople's Union might tolerate Unitarian views but does not promote such a drift.

The Church of England has done one thing in this direction only, and it is to relegate the Thirty-nine Articles to historic formularies. No clergyperson has to agree with them in any detail now. The rest remains intact. The rest remains intact in every Anglican Church, whatever the shades of opinion that do exist.

Now perhaps some people are a bit postmodern or novel-like about these beliefs. Incidentally, Unitarianism and postmodernism in some understandings have not got along well: Unitarianism was a project to preserve as much 'truth' in belief in an objective system as simple faith supported. Conscience and decisions about believing were subjective and individual. Postmodernism tries to overcome the objective-subjective divide, and postmodernism works best with more clutter not more simplicity. Unitarianism historically wants to know what is in the box, whereas postmodernism and Christianity is interested in the box.

Today much Unitarianism is 'playful', as good postmodernists often are, with its various belief elements. There is more in the way of collective packages and groupings, and less in the way of pure individualism. But Christian postmodernists hang on to the package: indeed some can be very conserving, like the Radical Orthodox. That they stick to the one means there is no Unitarian drift here: it is trying a new way to revitalise trinitarian Christianity when there is no objective truth about such a belief package - you just follow it. Such is not a drift.

So for Unitarian drift you need a really humanising Jesus according to how science understands the development of humanity, that the Christian Bible is but one view of something much wider, that the Pauline origin tradition gets replaced by a broader view of religion and salvation, or that there needs to be something like a frequent interfaith approach to ordinary church services. Liturgically there needs to be revision towards variety and simplicity and actual theological change involved.

This is not found at The Episcopal Church, or the Anglican Church of Canada, or at any other Anglican Church. It's not that it cannot happen: it can. It just isn't.

Gaza and Bush's Nod

One can do no more than note that the Israeli action into Gaza is being done in the dying days of the Bush regime in the United States. He is giving them the nod, as he and Blair did with the pointless and counter-productive action in Lebanon some years ago.

We all know that taking out a political and military leadership in a situation of oppression simply grows another political and military leadership. They will still get their rockets and they will still fire them. All the Israelis will do is add to the ghetto reality of the overpopulated thin strip of land.

Bombing and destroying infrastructure, attacking in crowded centres, achieves nothing in the long term than destruction itself and living closer to the edge. The only way to improve security is to ease the grounds for extremism in the first place.

On this, I don't expect Obama to be much better, but he may (with Hillary Clinton) make a longer term and credible effort towards settlement of a Palestinian state. The Israelis might like to deliver a headache to him. All the present days illustrate is just what a disaster George W. Bush has been: ignorant, blinkered, pathetic and someone in power who leaves a trail of direct and surrogate death and destruction.

ACI and What God Wants

A minority within The Episcopal Church (and just outside TEC) are apparently no longer following a replacement strategy, one that used to look like:

strategies and tactics designed to use meetings of the House of Bishops and the General Convention to stop TEC's progressive march toward liturgical and even doctrinal Unitarianism.

Such is unrealistic, say the self-defined 'orthodox' insiders. Once again there is no detail or substance to this charge, that appears more like a slur than any actual incident having taken place. What movements, precisely, have taken place towards liturgical and even doctrinal Unitarianism?

The replacers have moved outside to the new Anglican Church of North America. The insiders, some of whom sit under the umbrella of the Anglican Communion Institute (ACI), think that having to go to an outside structure implies criticism of themselves as being too passive.

However, these insiders state that they have convictions that are hardly passive: they now just believe that God will act on these in his own time and in his own way. Nevertheless, to give God a push * they are demanding that TEC pursues several commitments:

1. To Windsor injunctions to stop (a) the blessing of same gender sexual unions; (b) such defined people being ordained; and (c) stopping unlicensed Episcopal oversight across existing boundaries.
2. To an Anglican Covenant that has clear consequences for Provinces that do not choose to ratify or abide by its terms.
3. To the Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury as the effective symbol of Anglican unity.
   
4. To the Instruments of Communion that order the Communion.
5. To evangelising and teaching those who do not follow Christ as Lord and Saviour, and service to those in need.
6. To Christian formation and equipping well of lay and clerical leadership through new forms of theological education in parishes and dioceses.
7. To partnership with other provinces of the Anglican Communion regarding the above.

Presumably point 5 and 6 helped by 7 would address the alleged march towards Unitarianism.

[Regarding * please see the comment provided by Pete Hobson. I think he is correct that I am wrong regarding (I concede at least) giving God a push. They are not giving God a push. But are they still making demands on TEC, or are these commitments just their own? The answer to that depends on this first line from the original article prior to the list of commitments:

The commitments required by differentiation within TEC are these.

Commitment to the Windsor injunctions...

This suggests to me that some sort of demand is being made on TEC, though it may accept difference, but again I concede that God is not being given a push.

I do not think it renders my main focus on the ACI article and its criticism irrelevant, and please read on as this was written originally. Readers can make their own minds up and even add any comment. Am I wrong?]

Now I would be quite a sympathiser with a march towards theological and liturgical Unitarianism in The Episcopal Church, and certainly this blog would be filled with praise for some such moves. I would identify examples in liturgy and examples in theology, show why they were Unitarian-compatible, and suggest that this was probably a good thing that TEC was moving in a direction that treated the creeds and basic affirmations as indeed Church of England Anglicans now officially treat the Thirty-nine Articles.

Other than for a few Interfaith gatherings and some personal individual statements, I cannot see any such movement. I see no move whatsoever in any official direction towards liturgical and theological Unitarianism. Now there are theological colleges that question the make-up and truth of Christian dogma, as they must if they want to follow hundreds of years of theologically related discovery, but so there are with many reasonable seminaries around the world, and yet they feed only private and individual opinion and not any official positions. Perhaps this ought to change, as did happen for the Thirty-nine Articles.

Perhaps the ACI wants its acceptable views only within theological formation and education, or perhaps shielding preachers and teachers from some of the more searching questions. It does not say. What it is worried about is an internal drift at the official level.

When you look at the list produced, which they associate with the will of God, you have to wonder whether such a God actually has other ideas from those of the ACI.

First of all, the boundary crossings have not stopped but now exist in a replacement intended province. So it is perhaps time that The Episcopal Church's mission towards inclusivity should begin again, now that there is a clear choice offered by the intending replacers.

Secondly the Covenant has not been passed by any provinces yet, and one that is intending to create a two tier communion is unlikely to be passed by a considerable constituency of provinces. So the upshot there would be disastrous, as many will be rightly outside such a Covenant. A Covenant that cannot attract enough in across the breadth of Anglicanism won't be born. One that can be born will not have the corrective mechanisms the insiders-with-convictions want. Well, all right, let's go down the road of balkanising Anglicanism: this bit with this Covenant, that bit with that Covenant, that part with no Covenant, that part with some Primates Council of its own. Of course TEC won't sign a Covenant that marginalises itself on the inclusivity agenda, and nor should it, and nor will a number of provinces. It won't even get through the Church of England, and that's firstly because the Church of England cannot be governed internationally and seconly because the Synod will not pass something that seeks to exclude another Anglican Church or two or three or many more (we know the list - from Scotland to New Zealand).

The only people dancing around the Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury are the Primates Council led replacers, seeking power to themselves and boundary crossing. The commitment to the Archbishop of Canterbury is always to his limited authority and even more limited power. He has roles and functions and that's it: but for some this seems to be too much, when what he does (or does not do) does not suit them.

The Instruments of Communion take their time: can these insiders really wait so long for an outcome that might simply be compromise layered over compromise?

None of this ACI statement understands that Anglicanism is a Communion of Churches, and it is the Churches that are the effective centres. Basically the Churches decide what other Churches they want to recognise at an official level, and this is why, decentralised, Anglicanism draws in cultural diversity and makes different decisions one from another.

The ACI has delusions that it speaks for some general homogeneous outside Anglicanism despite being a minority in TEC. It perhaps only speaks for itself. There is no reason why TEC should pay any attention to its list at all.

The anti-inclusive Windsor injunctions are failing: yet TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada, despite the strain involved, has remained more loyal to these injunctions than have the boundary crossers. The Covenant is subject to negotiation and being acceptable and being accepted: if it survives it may simply not function like the ACI assumes. The Archbishop of Canterbury and Communion Instruments will presumably just go on as before anyway, unless the Primates Council and GAFCON continue to undermine them - how will, for example, the Primates Council undermine the Primates Meeting? Presumably theological education will go on as before, and still with little impact on official doctrines expressed by the Church (if they ever make such a change, do call the Unitarian Universalist Association: this could be an exciting partnership!). Also relationships between Churches in Anglicanism will continue: efforts to centralise cannot cut across the cultural differences, and the supposed centre has no authority to undermine the Churches that constitute Anglicanism as an identifiable form of Christianity.

What have we learnt recently from weather and financial systems alike? If you centralise and speed things up you increase the likelihood of chaotic behaviour and system breakdown. When there is stress, the necessity is to decentralise and weaken formal connections, not add to them. Calm down, slow down, and do what is true at the locality.

Hedges' Warning

Chris Hedges is a graduate of a United States liberal seminary but who moved towards Socialism with a prophetic edge: his latest piece for Truthdig has a warning for 2009 and beyond:

If Barack Obama does not end the flagrant theft of taxpayer funds by corporate slugs and the disgraceful abandonment of our working class, especially as foreclosures and unemployment mount, many in the country will turn in desperation to the far right embodied by groups such as Christian radicals. The failure by the left to offer a democratic socialist alternative will mean there will be, in the eyes of many embittered and struggling working- and middle-class Americans, no alternative but a perverted Christian fascism. The inability to articulate a viable socialism has been our gravest mistake. It will ensure, if this does not soon change, a ruthless totalitarian capitalism.

It always amazes me that Americans cannot organise a free at the point of use health service: after all, the education of children is free at the point of use, and the military doesn't come with a set of charges for purchases last year.

Hedges left the liberal Church and toughened up his view of the world via reporting on central American conflicts. He opposed Bush's warmongering while the American mass media had forgotten its objectivity. He criticises the current batch of simplistic atheists as well as the far right Christians that he fears will be the last port of call of a desperate American nation.

As for the liberal Church, when he attends he dislikes:

the inanity of the sermons and the arrogance of many congregants, who appear to believe they are "honorary" sinners. The liberal church, attacked by atheists as an ineffectual "moderate" religion and by fundamentalists as a "nominal" form of Christianity, is as its critics point out, a largely vapid and irrelevant force… it does not understand how the world works or the seduction of evil. The liberal church is largely middle class, bourgeois phenomenon, filled with many people who have profited from industrialisation… and global capitalism. They often seem to think that if "we" can only be nice and inclusive, everything will work out. The liberal church also usually buys into the myth that we can morally progress as a species… [and has a] naive belief in our goodness and decency - this inability to face the dark reality of human nature, our capacity for evil and the morally neutral universe we inhabit…

…Religious institutions, however, should be separated from the religious values imparted to me by religious figures, including my father. Most of these men and women ran afoul of their own religious authorities. Religion, real religion, involved fighting for justice, standing up for the voiceless and the weak, reaching out in acts of kindness and compassion to the stranger and the outcast, living a life of simplicity, cultivating empathy and defying the powerful. It was a commitment to care for the other. Spirituality was defined not by "how it is with me," but rather by the tougher spirituality of resistance, the spirituality born of struggle, of the fight with the world's evils. This spirituality, vastly different from the narcissism of modern spirituality movements, was eloquently articulated by King and the Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned and put to death by the Nazis.

People who do impress Hedges include theologians like William Stringfellow, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Abraham Heschel, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

One of the rationales behind my own presentation of theologians locally is to face up to some of these issues (and indeed what happened to Germany): what the modernist theologians did to protect their christocentric theological schemes and how they put up resistance to Nazism or gave assistance to those who got out.

We've yet to do Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr before coming on to looking at Anglican controversies in the past decades and then moving on to some very contemporary theologians. I suggest that of the moderns Reinhold Niebuhr will become more relevant this coming year because of his theology based on resisting labour-dehumanising trends in corporate America and his understanding of collective sin and pragmatism. He tied his theology to economic and social realities. We've seen credit and asset bubbles, operator greed and collective fraud in a fast-moving worldwide computerised system that has broken down.

All these theologians were intended correctives to liberal theologians of the nineteenth century, and the one behind Niebuhr is Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1917) of public sins in a society that organises itself (which all do) and the social responsibility to build up the Kingdom of God in a practical sense.

Historically in Britain liberal churches have been middle class (like so many denominations: they rarely penetrated the working class; the Anglican Church is establishment and so is feudal class derived) which meant that they came with respectable urban money and 'reached out' with educational and social provision; to some of the radicals of the later nineteenth century they were inadequate and failed to fully connect. An experiment with forming Labour Churches was unsuccessful. It seemed that organised religion had a class base that was its undermining.

My own view today is that theology, and even an open theology that brings back the relevance of other disciplines and cuts into all the artificial protection for christology, has to cease to be purely personal or story based - narratives and biographies and all that - and connect with the reality of economic and social life and has to be theoretical and anthropological (allowing the biographical back in). If it doesn't then it is in danger of being an irrelevant pasttime for those with secure pensions and stipends. Perhaps the rough economic situation in at least 2009 will encourage a move to a tougher and more realistic, more informed by economics and sociology, approach to doing theology.

Much theology tends to be an ecclesiastical dogfight, a battle over diminishing territory that keeps insiders happy and busy but is utterly irrelevant for a society in stress. Theologians need to address politics, economics and society more and their Churches somewhat less.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, much will be based around the economy and the common prediction that 2009 will be rough. The kind of public spending on projects that would make a difference needs to be started rapidly if there will be a pick-up in 2010. In the UK what is being brought forward is hardly enough to make a difference, and 2010 will see tax rises to choke off any recovery.

The current Israeli action against Hamas and spilling into the population shows again that without a comprehensive peace in the Middle East nothing will last. Gaza is like a prison camp or huge ghetto that has fallen into extremism and despair, and the Israelis do have to trade land for peace at the West Bank. Getting that right and compromising about Jerusalem, and if they want a wall to put it inside the 1967 boundary and not around settlements and a bit more, might just lead to a form of stability for the wider Middle East too including Iraq and, longer term, Pakistan and as far as Afghanistan. Islam was never as anti-semitic as it is now; and trying to get a peace with Israel might lead to Islam being less reactionary and open to some sort of critical reform.

In terms of world religion, and even world Christianity, the spat between the Global Anglican Future Conference and elements of the Anglican Communion is but a blip on the landscape. The evangelicals and charismatics that fill the media halls and occupy satellite stations care about pastors and authority but don't care a jot about bishops and Anglican formularies. In the landscape of megachurches, and then struggling churches under their shadows, the GAFCON dispute is just a peculiar side show in one denomination. In England some metropolitan cities produce large churches, and some suburbs do, and have specialities, but most do not, and the existence of some independent denomination that fills its space - say like Abundant Life in Bradford, sucks the life out of other evangelical churches more than other kinds.

As for the Anglican dispute, regarding the Anglican Church of North America and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, a stalemate is most likely. The Communion may be effectively moribund, with the main actors busy in its corners and this Primates Council presenting itself as an authority competition within the Communion but appealing to no one but itself. Nevertheless, this Covenant saga may weary itself onwards, a dead horse with no point to it, flogged on and on, with neither point nor purpose for either side. It will have to be forgetable to be passable.

Other denominations are in considerable decline: we see this within the United Kingdom especially. The Methodist Church is almost systematically closing churches, and the URC has continued with compatible mergers and closures. One wonders how Unitarianism struggles along, with its lack of any clear identity, and recent years saw serious central rationalisation. Roman Catholic attendance was boosted by foreign labour, but was in a condition of decline, and we know that the Pope would prefer a smaller, purer Church than one with more outreach and compromised.

Anglican bishops in England may moan about the withdrawal from the public square, but this is what continues. There are several reasons, but the simplest is, despite involvement in schooling, Christianity is no longer part of ordinary public discourse. It is a minority pursuit. It's not that it has lost the intellectual argument (which it has, in the causality of anything) but that ordinary, practical, day to day thinking does not need it: we lead daily, practical, rational-enough, this-worldly lives. There are New Atheists out to give it a further kicking, but it is fairly kicked in already. Many just nod at what they write, and others see it as superfluous.

Christianity has failed to communicate. It has not found a mode by which it can communicate, because it always ends up falling back to dogma. It is almost scared of the world: thus its retreating on sexuality when finally society comes to broadening its boundaries. Christian strategies seem to be entertainment-emotionalism tied to a simplisting all or nothing literalism, a retreat into a kind of classical music concertism, and the attachment of blinkers with an awful lot of internal talk, and the promotion of socialising (with some genuinely useful and sometimes communal pastoral contact). I don't have an answer, though somehow it needs some engaging discussion with the world about the world's concerns, without the trickery of the recruiters. In the end human contact, a sense of a home from home, and using one's language, is what lasts, but Christianity may be too stuck in its own 'claims' to reach out and engage. Presumably 2009 will see more in the way of Fresh Expressions, but this is something of an add-on that does not disturb the core, it doesn't seem coherent, and can mean all sorts of experiments and even has a sense of desperation about it. Try it and see, one supposes, whatever it does.

Even liberal religion and liberal Christianity need some sort of reviving. It too is stuck in trying to be acceptable to the rest, trying to be broad across narrowing institutions. It ought to communicate better and be less fearful of institutions. It has to address the authority of the individual and the accountability of the group and whoever it proposes as servers of the group. It has to use education and not hide the controversial, and be prepared to pull down as well as raise up. Liberal religion ought to be subversive: that is its role. One of its sayings should be, "But it's not like that is it?" - especially when dogma is presented as poorly supported truth when the truths available are broader and wider, and make more sense in the world in which we live. Liberal religion has to join up with the arts and present itself as more life enhancing, to build up people in this difficult world, and be a forum for questions of meaning in a spiritual context. In as far as institutions will target liberal forms of faith in 2009, its response should be to stand up for both the use of reason and being reasonable, to promote social and religious liberty and to live with the difference that makes humankind interesting.