Letters

Dear Editor,

I very rarely disagree with my wise friend Dr Philip Lewis, but his letter in your last issue does suggest some serious misconceptions which demand rebuttal.

In the first place, what do we mean by ‘The Church’? Quite simply, the church is its members, past and present, the body of all Christian people. It is certainly not the building, nor is it, on its own, the hierarchy of its professionals, Bishops, Priests and Deacons. To say that the huge numbers of Christian people, past and present, who have lived godly, sober and righteous lives through times of real trial and suffering have ‘singularly failed to engage with [the] concerns’…[of] ‘who they are, why they are here, how they should live… what will happen after they die’ is so far a travesty of truth as to be insulting both to the dead and to living Christians whom he knows. That is precisely what the Christian faith does engage with, offering not so much final answers as routes to understanding for those who have the courage to take up its challenge.

Second, there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what the Church can preach and teach. It may well change its liturgies and its services, and does: some like myself might regret many recent changes. Some of the clergy have been extremely silly in their struggling to get on various fashionable bandwagons, and have done neither themselves nor the perception of the Church, the people they serve, any good. But the Church cannot change the essential message it preaches to trim it to the winds of popular favour or fashion, and still remain the Church, for it is built on a historical narrative rather than on the ideas that are dominant at the moment in the disciplines of psychology or sociology or psychotherapy. Nothing goes out of fashion as quickly as fashion, and one mission of the Church is to be critical of what passes current in any age, constantly to be testing it against the touchstone of its historical claims, its theology, and its experience of human frailty and suffering over two millennia. Sometimes the new will be of value, true coin; sometimes it will be base metal, a fraud, and the Church must say so even if it is unpopular, ever if politicians and the media and other ephemera pour scorn upon it.

Third: this business of ‘cataclysmic decline’. It has been said many times before, and the death of the Church, like the death of God, has been widely reported. Each time both events have been greatly exaggerated, and there is no real reason to doubt that we are in a similar case now. In fact, on a world wide scale, simply on numbers, the Church is growing faster than it ever has done before. The myopia that comes with living in the West, in comfortable, materialistic England, easily blinds one to the fact that what is happening here, in this backwater, has to be seen as part of a much bigger picture. A wise old man of my acquaintance, who will be 89 in April, said to me recently, ‘We are living in England not in a post-Christian but a pre-Christian age.’

There are many other points of difference, which I know we shall air privately, but they are of less substance. I want to make one final point, arising from Dr Lewis’ suggestion that ‘[the Church ask] people from other religions to talk’. The world’s great religions have an enormous amount in common in the views they offer of the universe we live in and of which we are a part. If only a tiny proportion of that common ground is true – and it can not be proved it is not - then we should all be on our knees in fear and trembling. And, if the claims that Christianity makes are true, namely that at a specific moment in historical time, at a visitable place, the maker of all took our humanity upon him, we should be on our knees in love and gratitude and awe as well.

Yours sincerely, 

Charles Moseley