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So hard to believe
First of a series of Lent talks, 12th March 2003
By Revd David Parsons
A snatch from radio play last month: One woman tells another - it’s set in Ulster - “My church means a lot to me.” The other says “I don’t believe.” The first says, “I don’t think I believe either. It’s so hard to believe these days. But I still need my church.” I may not have got the exact words, but that’s the impression.
So hard to believe. That’s what I want to deal with this evening. It’s something that presses in on all of us - unless we shut ourselves away from our fellow men and women, and never watch TV, never listen to the radio, never read a newspaper. It can’t have escaped any of us that we who believe in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ are in a minority, that if we tell a stranger that we go to church they are likely to be surprised. What’s more, the majority that don’t believe think that their position is the most natural in the world. It makes it so hard to believe.
Another angle on the same modern trend: How many believing Christian characters do you know in TV soaps? There’s Dot in Eastenders - and she’s rather peculiar. Or in other TV series? I go in for those old-fashioned detective stories myself, Morse and Frost and suchlike. Only very occasionally will you find a sympathetic character who is a Christian. Sometimes a wise old priest; even once Inspector Wexford talked with a wise young Methodist or Baptist Minister. But apart from them? The most religious person usually turns out to be psychologically twisted, and is probably the murderer.
It seems that ‘the media’ are run by a group of cynical atheists living in the South East of England; and their influence goes deep. Even in the USA, where churchgoing is much more common than here, the intellectual climate created by the media takes no account of Christians. The New York Times carried an article about this only a week ago yesterday:
“Claims that the news media form a vast liberal conspiracy strike me as utterly unconvincing, but there's one area where accusations of institutional bias have merit: nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans.
“That's the proportion who described themselves in a Gallup poll in December as evangelical or born-again Christians. Evangelicals have moved from the fringe to the mainstream.”
But the media, the article went on to explain, go on behaving as though they - we - don’t exist. It’s discouraging. It makes it so hard to believe.
But if we are going to be Christians in fact and in truth, then faith is the very heart of our life. “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” That’s what we heard from Romans 10 a few minutes ago. When that faith is attacked on all sides, we need to take the attack very seriously, and do something about it.
I want to put before you a seven point plan to counter the decline in belief, the attacks on faith.
1. We need to hold fast to the fact that Christianity is about truth - not fashion.
One reason that the Alpha Course has been so effective is that it deals, right at the beginning, with the truth of the Christian faith in Jesus, with the historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth, in secular Roman historians as well as Christian writings, and with the scholarly evidence for the reliability of the New Testament documents. That’s news to the majority of non churchgoers, in my experience. They have written off the Christian faith without knowing what it is, and why Christians are confident about accepting it. And that’s our fault, yours and mine. But we ourselves are suffering from our own failure. We suffer by living in a world of unbelief.
Terry Pratchet has written a very successful series of Discworld novels. They are pure fantasy, but in his imaginary universe called Discworld Terry Pratchet manages to satirise many people, institutions and places in this world. One book, called I think ‘The small gods’, is the story of a god who was once very powerful, because many people believed in him. When fashions changed, and he was neglected, he shrank. That’s the author’s thesis, that gods exist only to the extent that people believe in them. And that’s very much what people do think nowadays. We had the news in the 1960s that ‘God is dead.’ What was true was that fewer people were going to church. But people went along with the nonsense view that a decline in faith has some effect on God himself.
The decline in Christian faith has been going on for a long time. It was way back in 1867 that Matthew Arnold wrote Dover Beach. Here are a few lines:
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
That melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the sea of faith was partly caused by the reaction, in my view foolish, of some Christians, certainly not all, to Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859. A great many Christians at the time welcomed Darwin’s new discoveries and insights as further glimpses of the way God works.But others retreated into a defensive position, and began the fight between what they saw as Christian truth and what most people saw as scientific truth. The result of this fight has been disastrous. I have spent the past 30 years having a lot of contact with young people in schools, both secondary and primary. I know that if young people are presented with a choice between the findings of science and the claims of Christianity, they will choose the science that can be tested against the religious claim that can’t. And quite right, too. Those who maintain that I can only be a Christian if I deny what my brain assures me is true, are making it more difficult for me and for everyone else to find the God of truth. They ensure that Richard Dawkins uses his position as Professor of the Public understanding of Science as if it were Professor for the attacking of Christianity.
I apologise if you are upset by this view of mine, but I do feel passionate about it.
To return to this first point in the seven point plan, our society is all for fashion, in morals and belief as in everything else. Moral positions like support for marriage can be attacked, not for being wrong, but for being ‘outdated.’ Against this world view, we must hold on to truth.
2. We need to know our enemy
I don’t here mean the world, the flesh and the devil. I take that unholy trinity as read. I am talking about people who make it their business to attack Christian faith.
I read this the other day: Mel Gibson is breaking new ground with a screen play he co-wrote with Ben Fitzgerald. Gibson is directing and financially backing the film. His new project, based on the four Gospels, is based on the last 12 hours of Christ.
The new movie, "The Passion," is different in several ways from previous films about Jesus. In an effort to be historically accurate Gibson had all the dialogue translated into Aramaic and/or Latin, with no plan for subtitles.
His "labor of love" took him nearly 10 years to write and rework, Gibson said. It seems that Hollywood is not jumping up and down about the film -- but rather ignoring it, or criticizing the effort. During an interview on "The O'Reilly Factor," on the Fox News Channel, Gibson revealed that an unnamed publication had been dispatched to "dig up dirt" on him, and he believes it is tied in with his new venture.
He was quoted as saying, "When you take up a subject like this, (Jesus Christ) it does bring out a lot of enemies." He added that his private life, his associates, friends and even his 85-year-old father have been entangled in the investigation.
It's strange how the true nature and life of Jesus brings out that type of reaction. It seems acceptable, especially to the Hollywood crowd, when Jesus is portrayed as some kind of wimp, loser or as having some kind of double-standard lifestyle. Recall "The Last Temptation of Christ," a film in which Jesus is depicted as self-doubting, fallible and fallen. The film by Martin Scorsese became the toast of Hollywood. Then there was Terrance McNally's "Corpus Christi," which portrayed Jesus as gay. The film was praised by critics. Yet another film by Andres Serrano was lauded as bold imagination.
Gibson said of his project, "This is a movie about love, faith and forgiveness. He (Jesus) died for all mankind. He suffered for all of us. It's time to get back to the basic message." This man who has climbed up the entertainment ladder has attempted this feat, even in the face of scorn.
It’s not just Hollywood. It’s not just the USA. Bishop Gavin Reid wrote last year about the British press: “If we stick to traditional teachings and practices, we are characterised as being old-fashioned and inflexible. If we encourage any accommodation to present-day culture, we are criticised for being ‘trendy’.” Gavin tells of being at a meeting with journalists in London “attended by top columnist Melanie Philips. She was asked to comment on my remarks, and startled me by saying: ‘The media do not like others centres of authority that tell people how to behave. For one thing, they may try to interfere with the media’s own agenda! But I would also like to suggest a more controversial reason. The media are not just hostile to the Church because they disapproved of it but because they are in the business of replacing the Church!’”
So it’s not just making fun of clergy for being woolly or trendy or out of touch. It’s a more all-embracing agenda. All that Christian faith stands for is to be discredited. Archbishop George Carey said a year or two ago: “A tacit atheism prevails. Death is assumed to be the end of life. Our concentration on the here-and-now renders the thought of eternity irrelevant.”
We must know our enemy. It’s not our local press - I see that Sister Lavinia Byrne is to be a local reporter - or even our local radio stations. They are near enough to the people to know what we think. It’s national media, here and in the USA. As St Paul wrote in Romans chapter 1, “They did not think it worth while to retain the knowledge of God... They are full of envy ... deceit and malice.” Let’s be on our guard.
3. We need to know our friends
Prince Charles famously said that as King he would wish to be ‘defender of faith’ rather than ‘of the faith.’ That’s got its bad side and its good side. The bad side is that he doesn’t seem to be so firm in his own faith as his mother. I’ve been very grateful for the Queen’s speaking about her faith in her Christmas broadcasts recently. The good side is that the Prince has at least found an acceptable way in our modern PC world to support Christians, as well as other religions, in a world that sneers at faith, or thinks that faith is a force for evil.
But let’s start with our nearest friends, our fellow-Christians. Confession time: My grandfather was Secretary to the Orange Order in Ireland. He was a deeply spiritual man, a man of unswerving faith, but if anyone had suggested to him that he and the Roman Catholics could be on the same side, could be on the side of Christ against the devil, he would not have understood what the person meant. Didn’t Roman Catholics obey the Antichrist? He stood firmly in the Synod of the Church of Ireland for banishing the Cross from standing on or anywhere near the Communion Table - it was popery! How mistaken my grandfather was in refusing to recognise that members of another Christian Church could be friends and allies in the fight against evil and unbelief!
St Paul wrote to the Corinthians (1 C 12.3) ‘No one can say “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.’ The Lord gives us fellow-believers to love in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. We can see the Conservative party damaging its own effectiveness by quarrelling among themselves, just as we saw the Labour party do 20 years ago. The Christian Church has one wonderful Master and Lord to unite around, Jesus Christ. We cannot fall out with each other over choosing another leader. We are friends and allies in the work of the Kingdom. The word devil means divider. Whenever we allow disagreements over secondary matters to bring division where there should be love, we are letting the devil win. We must know our friends.
But there’s a further, rather surprising group of potential friends, and that is people of other, non-christian religions. Obviously I’m talking about a different kind of friendship. It’s not fellowship in the Spirit. It’s not shared worship. But we need to know that Christians in this country have supporters in the Jewish and Muslim communities, for example. They want us Christians to be bolder, more Christian, more faithful.
Even the extremist Bin Laden supporter in London, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, gave a kind of backhanded encouragement in an interview earlier this year. He said that Islam was making progress because Muslims knew where they stood and were faithful, whereas Christianity was losing ground because Christians didn’t know what they believed and went along with the secular mood.
A more reasonable Muslim, Dr Zaki Badawi, the principal of the Muslim College in London and chair of the Imams and Mosques Council UK said this:
“Here in Britain, we also see the secularisation of society, the absence of God from the schools, from science – it seems that you have to apologise almost for being a religious person nowadays. That’s why we feel more comfortable with a believer, whether he’s Jewish or Christian – we feel there is communication between us. But we find no way of communicating with the ones who reject all religion, and we get frightened because we think society is being led by these people.”
Dr Badawi quoted the Qur’an: ‘Let the people of the Torah implement the Torah. Let the people of the Injil [that is, the book which we consider to be the words of Jesus] implement what he says.’
To quote from Bishop Gavin Reid’s book again. Gavin was the man who got the government to recognise that the Millenium was a Christian celebration. He went to see Mrs Bottomley and explained that the date 2000 had no meaning outside the Christian faith. She accepted that, but said that it might prove difficult for Christianity to be placed in the middle of government-sponsored national celebrations, as ‘that might marginalise the other faith communities.’ Gavin goes on:
I was helped by officials in Church House to identify, through the Inter-Fatih Network, this group of representatives which met in May. It included two Muslims, two Jews, a distinguished Sikh and a Hindu. I told them what Mrs Bottomley had said about the danger of Christian celebrations in the millennium marginalising their communities. To my surprise they all smiled and chuckled. The Muslims saw the millennium as a proper opportunity for the largest religious community in the country to put God on the map in a country that was moving towards secularism. The Sikh, Indarjit Singh, saw Jesus as a great religious teacher who ought to be properly commemorated. He even went and said so on two occasions when speaking on the Thought for the Day slot on Radio 4. The Rabbi laughed sadly and said,’We have our festivals - why can’t you have yours? Thank God this is still a Christian country.’
Gavin walked round the Faith Zone of the Millennium Dome with another Rabbi. He asked him, “Does it not bother you that Christianity gets so much of the space?” The Rabbi said “Oh no. It would have bothered me if Christianity did not get most of the space!”
On Monday four people discussed ‘faith schools’, Christian and Muslim. It was not the Muslim who disliked the idea of a Christian school, but Kate Hellman, Course Manager at Lambeth Further Education College, who was bitterly against any teaching of faith as a way of life rather than as just an interesting school subject. We should know our friends.
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Now that is the end of my first three points, the controversial ones. I have four more, but they are brief and uncontroversial - though very important. So this is the time for you to have your say. I have some suggestions for discussion, but of course you are free to say what you like.
1. What makes it hard for you to believe in 2003?
2. What makes it hard for other people?
3. Have I overstated the hostility of the media to Christianity?
4. Has our local Church lost its nerve?
5. Who do you recognise as friends of Christianity?
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4. We need to know and study our faith - doubt our doubts.
In Ormskirk, Lancs, where I was a curate wet behind the ears, I lodged with a wonderful Christian woman called Mrs Parker. She had a lovely garden, and studied her gardening magazines. I started a bookstall in the parish church, and Mrs Parker said: “So you think we are all ignorant?” For some reason it was perfectly natural for her to want to read about gardening, but the thought of reading about her Christian faith was strange and insulting.
If that’s a widespread feeling, then no wonder it’s so hard to believe. If we don’t study and think, as well as pray and read the Bible, our faith will stay immature, and we’ll be a pushover for any well-read atheist we meet. John Polkinghorne, old boy of Elmhurst School, is one author well worth reading. He lectured in the Cathedral on Feb 18th on Christianity and the End of the World. Let me quote a little of what he has written on the subject:
“The history of the universe is the story of a gigantic tug of war. On one side is the effect of the Big Bang, driving the matter of the world apart. On the other side is the relentless pull of gravity, trying to make things come together. These two forces are very evenly balanced and we can’t tell which will win in the end. ... Either way, untimately all is futility. It won’t happen tomorrow, of course. This fate lies tens of billions of years into the future, but it’s as certain as it can be that humanity, and all life, will only be a transient episode in the history of the universe. What does religion make of this? Don’t these bleak predictions deny the claim that a purpose is at work in the world? Here’s a challenge we’ve got to take on board. ... If there really is a true and lasting hope, it can only rest in the eternal being of God himself.” Then John Polkinghorne goes on to examine the New Testament, and the wonder and the problems of eternal life. We need to think through problems such as this. On a lighter note, here’s a joke.
One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.
The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need You. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don't You just go on and get lost."
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done talking, God said,
"Very well, how about this, let's say we have a man-making contest?"
To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!"
But God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam."
The scientist said, "Sure, no problem," and bent down and grabbed a handful of dirt.
"No, no, no," God said as He looked at the scientist. "You go get your own."
5. We need to stick with the practices of our faith
We know that a frightening number of people have been leaving the Church over the past four decades. That much is statistical fact. The reasons are less clear. It is partly because there are so many different things to do on a Sunday. It is partly that there has been a steady decline in people joining groups, clubs and movements of any sort. It is partly the anti-Christian influences that we’ve been thinking about.
But I am pretty certain that long before a person stops attending Church, their spiritual life has become slack or even non-existent. Their daily private prayer has probably gone. They no longer read the Bible every day. I don’t know what proportion of our own congregations read the Bible daily, but if Bible Society surveys are anything to go by, and we are typical, it’s a pitifully low percentage.
You may have heard me tell in the past the story of the Indian who described his inner life as like two dogs fighting inside him, a good dog and a bad dog. When he was asked which one usually won the fight, he answered: “The one I feed the most.” It’s not hard to work out how long we expose ourselves each week to the mainly godless media, and compare that with the time we spend in spiritual reading and meditation and prayer.
And if we feel things slipping, then let’s not be too proud to make use of set forms of prayer. There have been times when I have been pulled back from drifting into losing my faith, by keeping doggedly on with the daily form of morning prayers in one or other of the Church of England books. Using set forms may not be on a par with the heights of communion with God that we enjoy in our best moments, but it’s a sight better than drifting down into unbelief.
6. We need Christian fellowship:
Our new Archbishop of Canterbury was quoted in The Times on Saturday 15th February as saying: “It is always such a relief to be in company where it doesn’t sound stupid to mention God.” I’m sure we’ve all felt that.
There are many reasons why God gave us the Church to belong to, the body of his Son, the fellowship of his Holy Spirit. It’s the family where we learn to love one another; it’s the meeting round the Lord’s table; it’s a model of the Kingdom of God. And it’s also the company where it doesn’t sound stupid to mention God, the place where our faith gets a chance to flower.
Don’t underestimate the influence of the people around you on what you believe. A large proportion of the USA population believes in UFOs - that aliens have visited this planet. I don’t, but if I lived in the USA among a community who all did, I expect I’d come round to sharing their view. The influence of people around is very strong. So as Christian believers we really do need each other, we need the support we can give each other in our faith.
I’ve been reading Geoffrey Bull’s second book, about what happened after he was freed from solitary confinement in China. He was able to keep his faith during that terrible time, but at what cost! It took him a long time to recover. God can keep us faithful even when Christian fellowship is impossible, but it’s not his normal way, and there’s no guarantee that he’ll keep us faithful if we deliberately neglect to meet together. “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another.” Hebrews 10.25
7. We need to teach others
I don’t know if you were ever asked to write an English composition at school describing a bicycle. I never was, but I’ve heard of it’s being set. You can imagine the pupil thinking “That’s easy. Everyone knows what a bicycle is like.” And then he sits down to write, and after a few moments he realises he’s not sure at all. He goes out to the garage to have a good look. He asks his parents. He tries turning the pedal to observe exactly what happens.
I believe it’s like that whenever we have to explain something to another person. I certainly learned Latin a lot more thoroughly once I began to teach it. And I thank God for the opportunity of learning more about him as I come to prepare sermons and talks. We shall think more another Wednesday about passing on the Gospel. All I say now is that not only is it essential for others; it is good for our own faith.
We believe in one God who made all things;
he alone stretched out the heavens
and spread out the earth:
he formed us in the womb,
He is our king and our redeemer -
the Lord God almighty.
We belong to the Lord -
we are his people
and are called by his name;
he pours out his Spirit upon us
as water on a thirsty land.
We believe in one God, the almighty,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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Thursday 20th of November 2008
