The old doctrines are not enough

The church must provide a valid assertion of truth about life that
can stand comparison truths and wisdom drawn from science
• Tom Sutcliffe

On the final day of the recent Church of England General Synod meeting there was a
rather worthy debate about how the claims of science are affecting belief in God. At
no point did any of the speakers remark on the surely important fact that the public
square these days is crowded with religions. Clearly, religious belief is not
incompatible with science. However, people in a multicultural society, who respect
the beliefs of all, must inevitably observe that all religions are similarly non-scientific
in the way they furnish different, often incompatible explanations about the meaning
of life, whereas science is systemically consistent. And this must account for the
different ways that people treat scientific truths and what are claimed as religious
truths.

Science is a method applied to whatever can be tested and observed. It makes no

claims save in those terms. Human knowledge, and the science that extends it, is
finite. But the boundaries of what is known continue to expand. As the Bible says –
"No man has seen God" in a scientific sense. So God seems, in a way, to be
diminishing in significance, becoming more remote and much less persuasive.
Unavoidably, science now suggests to some – as it always has – that God is not an
objective necessity. Wisdom is no church monopoly. Lucretius in De Rerum Natura
doubted whether anything humans could do would have any effect on the gods,
rather in the same way that one may be at a loss when one seeks a present for
somebody much richer who has everything already. A being who cannot be seen or
known cannot be tested scientifically.

It is impossible to evaluate the truth claims of different world religions. But they do
have one thing in common: they are centred on the human being. Religions perceive
the goodness which they acknowledge as the focus of the divine (of which God can
seem to be a personalisation) in terms of a profoundly humane vision. Religions,
with their mostly overlapping sets of shared beliefs, seem to reflect human culture as
much as divine revelation. Perhaps, as has been suggested by some, the human mind
is hardwired to resonate philosophically with the idea of God.

But what kind of God do we believe in? – as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan
Williams, has put it, when explaining the various kinds of God he does not believe in.
I myself find the leap of faith increasingly difficult. Since I joined the General Synod
almost 20 years ago, I have constantly been asking myself whether I should be there
at all, something which fellow members may have been asking about me too. I know
that my personal idea of Christianity is unorthodox, though I am thankful to find a
home in the Church of England which is a national church where the thought-police
are not bothered by whatever a lay cradle Anglican does or does not believe. I see that
faith stories need to be accepted – just as attending Hamlet or The Ring involves
suspending disbelief, and going along with the story. I also appreciate there are many

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faithful Christians who are blissfully certain about the classic church doctrines:
resurrection, incarnation, virgin birth, trinity.

Yet something has changed radically and cannot be restored by traditional services,
hymn-singing, or resolute assertive preaching. A very large number of people today,
many of them members of Christian churches, some of them Anglican priests, do not
believe in the afterlife, heaven, or hell. When I die I may alarmingly discover that
death is not the end. I am not an atheist, but I am agnostic about eternity. St Paul felt
the promise of an afterlife made all the difference, but I incline to David Jenkins's
teaching about the resurrection. Why would God, or we ourselves, benefit from our
eternity? For me, much of the doctrinal edifice developed during the decades and
early centuries after the crucifixion has crumbled. One life is enough for most, too
much for some.

I believe God to be a powerful, dangerous, potentially crucial idea. God exists in the
minds of millions of human beings. Perhaps he put himself there. Nobody can wholly
agree (save in worked-out, traditional religious positions) who he is or what he or she
wants. But that's the whole point. Nobody owns God. God is the discourse of our
existence.

What matters is what God would want. And our views about what God should want
need to acknowledge what the tradition has maintained about God, since wisdom is
distilled by long usage. Yet a belief in God and the afterlife that is unmodulated by
proper doubts and questioning can be extremely dangerous. It justified violence and
cruelty long before present day jihads.

I continue to be profoundly attracted to the teaching and person of Jesus, and try to
follow him as a "living lord" in my own way. He constantly provokes and challenges,
as he did in his lifetime. He is, in that sense, risen again – and even sometimes,
through his spirit, clearly leading our church which is his resurrection body.

But these are mere words. The challenge for the church is to translate the crumbling
edifice of traditional Christian belief into a valid assertion of truth about life that can
stand comparison with the equally valid truths and wisdom drawn from scientific
perception and deduction. The General Synod debate seemed desperately naive to
me because it was around a motion asking for robustness in preaching the
compatibility of science and religion without any admission that the plethora of
religions in itself renders the claims of all religions implausible and wobbly to most
ordinary people – compared with the comparative coherence of what can be
scientifically established.

We Christians can only show how our religion adds up through the way we live our
lives, and through such interpretations of theological or biblical ideas as ring true.
The Bible and Qur'an are there, like Shakespeare and like the theories of science, for
human nourishment and freedom – not to imprison us. What matters is what we can
believe to be truth. That is what sets us free. Belief systems and doctrines are not an
end but a profound means. The command to love what is good and to love your
neighbour promotes ideas that are not easy to reconcile. That, nevertheless, is the
essence of communion.