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We have seen in the previous chapters how turbulent changes taking place in twentieth-century British and European (yet not so much in American) society have made possible a serious assault on Christian beliefs and values. So how can an “Age That Lost Its Nerve” come to build up fresh confidence in itself, see the New Atheism for what it really is, and rediscover the compass?
Strange as it may sound coming from a Christian theist who has spent the last thirteen chapters tracing the historical roots of, analysing, and hopefully countering the myths generated by atheists and secularists, I must admit that I rather admire Richard Dawkins. On the one hand, I admire him as a biological scientist of great gifts and insight. But equally, if not more so, I admire him as a highly gifted communicator and teacher of science, as a writer of elegant and sometimes lyrical prose, and – when he does not get carried away denouncing the Almighty and ridiculing those who believe in him – as a powerful and compelling lecturer and broadcaster. I also admire his confidence in what he believes to be right, and his commitment to telling the truth as he sees it, come hell or high water – traits which he shares with his alter ego Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog”, and with other present-day sceptics such as Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, and the philosopher Daniel Dennett.
Why, though, I constantly ask myself, is this ability to argue and present a case forcefully and decisively less conspicuously displayed on the Christian side? Not, by any means, because of any lack of intellectual heavyweights in that quarter, for the church, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, has always been, and still is, a magnet for very powerful minds. The problem is, I believe, a modern one, and especially one of the late twentieth century. It is related, I suspect, to the development of certain anti-combative tendencies within parts of Christendom. I take my hat off, however, to powerful Anglican writers and debaters such as John Polkinghorne, Keith Ward, Alister McGrath, and John Lennox, and Catholics such as Father Nicholas Corte SJ and Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ – all of whom are stalwart apologists (in the true sense of apologia, “justification”) of the Christian faith without being in the least bit “apologetic”.
But why do the media give so much coverage to the outspoken atheists? Yes, the media may be “institutionally left-wing and secularist”, but journalists also like outrageous statements and catchy “one-liners”; and here, I have to admit, the atheists often win hands down. On the other hand, let us remember that Christianity was born out of catchphrases and memorable “one-liners”: “God so loved the world that He sent His own beloved Son”, “Repent”, “Love your neighbour”, “Render unto Caesar”, “This is My body broken for you”, “Be still”, “Feed My sheep”, and a host of others. What I would suggest has happened in our own time is that Christians as a body have become too self-conscious and too defensive, and in many cases much too serious. They need to remember that he who died on the cross to save the world also possessed the genial good humour to stop the booze running out at the Cana wedding. Quite simply, Christians need to relearn how, in the most generous-hearted sense, to “give as much as they get” and “Fight the Good Fight”; as when, in 2012, William Lane Craig humorously responded to the atheist anti-God bus adverts campaign with a counter-slogan proclaiming: “There’s probably no Dawkins.”
Two world wars, post-imperial guilt, and perhaps radical socialism have also played their part in allowing the atheists and secularists to seize the high ground in many aspects of public life, such as framing public policy, education, and the media. And this applies in particular to people who have received what might be called an “elite education”, people made to feel guilty in certain ways, for being the kind of people they are, and for what their cultural ancestors may be perceived as having done – including spreading the Christian faith. But Christians in the twenty-first century need to have the courage to re-enter the hurly-burly of public life, and in particular the media and politics. They must learn that turning the other cheek does not, by definition, mean becoming a hand-wringing doormat – for it would be hard to find a less “doormat”-like person in the whole of history than the Man who loved the sinners he berated so much that he was willing to be crucified to save them!
What is important to bear in mind, however, is that until very recent times it was often men who had received an “elite education” at public school and Oxbridge or from armed forces backgrounds who had the confidence, the resources, and the daring to take the Christian faith to the far-flung corners of the globe; while it was their lay brethren who, in the nineteenth century, carried the most humane and civilizing empire in world history (whatever its faults) – the British Empire – across the broad waters of the world.
John and Charles Wesley, for instance, were descended from a modest clerical background, went to school at The Charterhouse and Westminster respectively, before both becoming undergraduates at Christ Church, Oxford. Their careers as evangelists and hymn-writers crossed all social boundaries, had an incalculable impact upon global Christianity, and are part and parcel of the well-known history of the faith (I recall once singing a Charles Wesley hymn in a Benedictine monastic church). Then there were the great missionary bishops, such as Reginald Heber and John William Colenso, who, in the nineteenth century, went to India and South Africa respectively.
The armed forces, moreover, had their share of courageous Christian leaders, such as Captain Sir Charles Middleton RN, later Lord Barham, and James, Lord Admiral Gambier RN. And there were those brilliant and spectacularly colourful Christian soldiers, General George Gordon and Major General Sir James Hope Grant. The individualistic and even eccentric Gordon, it was said, confidently bestrode the world with his officer’s cane in one hand and a Bible in the other; and his broad, generous-hearted, non-sectarian humanity won him the friendship of ordinary Chinese and Arab people, before he died a hero’s death as, unarmed, he unflinchingly faced his fanatic Mahdist murderers in Khartoum in 1885. And Hope Grant, in addition to being sustained in all adversities by his evangelical faith, never went anywhere in the world without his cello! And let us not forget “the lady with the lamp”, Florence Nightingale, herself the devout, individualistic Anglican daughter of wealthy parents, who saw her nursing vocation not only as a humanitarian but also as a Christian one. Florence was driven by a conviction of having been personally called by God to do his work among the sick. And these are but a few of those persons “born into the gentry”, as it were, who made no bones about their faith, and who never apologized for it, no matter what was thrown at them, at home or abroad.
And then what about those men – and women – from “non-elite” circumstances who displayed a clear-sighted confidence in their calling, and were inspired to live their faith in the world? And I don’t just mean those who founded or evangelized the faith and sometimes suffered martyrdom in its early days, but much more modern figures. Take, for instance, the itinerant tinker John Bunyan, who between serving prison sentences for his radical Christian views and kettle-mending wrote some of the most powerful devotional literature in the English language, most notably The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Or General William Booth and his wife Catherine, called away from a comfortable ministry in a big Methodist chapel to serve and inspire those at the very bottom of society with their Salvation Army. Or Wilson Carlile, with his Church Army, after 1882. Or Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great Victorian Baptist preacher; Dr David Livingstone, the Scottish mill-worker who became a medical missionary explorer in Africa; and, in our own time, Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to minister to the poorest of the poor in the alleyways of Calcutta. And what about those Oxbridge-educated “slum priests” who went to work in London’s East End and other areas of acute social and spiritual deprivation? I am thinking here of figures such as the Oxford Movement Anglo-Catholics Charles Fuge Lowder and Alexander Mackonichie, living, in most cases, not as gentlemen in isolation, but simply digging in and living the Christian life alongside their poverty-stricken parishioners. Salvation Army and Church Army officers did exactly the same thing.
It is essential, therefore, that Christians confidently remind the secularists and the mockers exactly what Christianity has done for the world, and the modes of thinking and acting that it has engendered. As we have seen in previous chapters, positive Christian achievement is so inextricably woven into the fabric of Western civilization that we often take it for granted or dismiss it as “natural”. We notice only the land-hungry, greedy exploiters of the empire, for instance, who were out for gold, diamonds, or slaves, rather than those who gave up their all to serve the native peoples of Africa or Asia – carrying with them not just the priceless gift of the gospel, but also supplying medicines, founding hospitals and schools, and showing a more constructive manner of living than endless slaughter and reprisal, and a way out of both economic and spiritual poverty. Dr Albert Schweitzer, who abandoned his career as an eminent theologian, virtuoso organist, and medical doctor in Germany to found his jungle hospital at Lambaréné in West Africa in 1913, is probably the most famous of many such missionaries in the twentieth century.
And from the late twentieth century, when Christianity had been long established and had touched many hearts in countries first visited by missionaries up to 200 years ago, wonderful success stories have abounded. I know one African gentleman, for example, who as a boy attended a mission school in his home country. His gifts of intellect – and personal charm – were noted, and he won an Oxford University scholarship. Having done brilliantly at Oxford, he trained as a lawyer, then took a theology degree, and now is actively involved in overseas Christian charity aid and mission work.
People like my African friend, in spite of being successful in education and the professions, however, are willing to speak openly and plainly about their faith, and its role in their lives. They are not cowed by the secularist onslaught. Nor are they apologetic about what they believe. And let us also remember that people from missionary-touched countries have availed themselves of opportunities of education and service ever since the nineteenth century.
I own, for example, a photograph of a Victorian bishop. There he stands, with great natural dignity, looking out benignly yet confidently, resplendent in lawn sleeves and episcopal habit. “So what?” some might say, “Just another well-to-do bishop.” But hold on. This gentleman is different. He is black. He is the Rt Revd Dr Samuel Adjavi Crowther (c. 1805–91), a liberated Yoruba slave, originally educated by the Church Mission Society in their college in Islington, London, and holding an honorary doctorate in divinity from Oxford University. He was perhaps Oxford’s first black honorand, and certainly the first black African bishop, appointed a missionary bishop in 1865 with a hefty chunk of West Africa as his diocese. And while I admit that Bishop Samuel was presented with a gargantuan missionary task by his friends and patrons in England, who had only the vaguest understanding of the complexities of the social structures, cultures, and religions of the indigenous African peoples, the fact remains that the Church of England appointed an African bishop with an Oxford DD degree to a new African diocese in 1865.
It is all too easy today to be patronizing about the global missionary movement, be it the Jesuits in China after 1596, or the Georgians and early Victorians in Africa. Yet these people carried a faith that was far from patronizing or self-satisfied. From that faith sprang an enormous courage, and a desire to take not the “Western imperial aggression” of secular mythology, but the Christian gospel, to many distant and diverse lands. And while many missionaries met their death and some were murdered, the candles of faith which they carried set vast tracts of the world ablaze with the Christian message. And when one hears today of the active persecution of Christians in Africa, Asia, Indonesia, and elsewhere, one must ask how that faith got there in the first place, and why Nigerians, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Iranians, and Indonesians are so strongly attached to their gospel faith that they prefer to be tortured or butchered rather than relinquish it. Indeed, one Sunday morning some years ago at a church in Oxford I recall being introduced to a group of visiting Iraqi Anglicans, ordained and lay. I often wonder how many of those brave men are still alive today.
So Christians must always remind themselves and others how their faith actually spread. While gold-seekers, land-grabbers, and empire-builders may – quite separately and opportunistically – have followed the missionaries to various parts of the world, we must never forget, as indicated earlier (and will stand repeating), that Christian evangelism throughout the centuries has been of the “hearts and minds” variety. Christianity, for instance, came to pagan Britain via a tiny handful of monks from the European continent. They came armed only with the gospel, and the knives they carried were only suitable for cutting their meat. Likewise, the Roman Catholic missions to China and Latin America, and Protestant missions to Africa, Polynesia, and elsewhere, went without soldiers or armed enforcement agencies. And whatever firearms were carried by British missionaries to Africa were for defence against dangerous animals, and to provide meat for the pot, and were not to shoot people. Indeed, on one occasion in 1844, when a springing lion was about to eat Dr David Livingstone (he leaves us an account of the incident), it was the guns and courageous action of his devoted African companions that helped to save his life.
And it was not for nothing, moreover, that General William Booth styled some of the British slums into which his Salvation Army first moved as “Darkest England”, for his Christian evangelists faced as much danger from British criminal groups, brothel-keepers, and drunken thugs who preyed upon the poor in the hell-holes of London’s East End as did any missionaries to Africa. While the Salvation Army came to be loved by the poor, many of whom found – and still find – inspiration and release through its missionary activities, organized evil has always hated it, and Salvationists have faced far more than cheap sneering and name-calling, but have had to withstand flying bricks, vicious gang attacks, knives, and even bullets. In many parts of the world they still do today. And this, one might say, is history brought into our own times!
So why, one might ask, do I go into all this detail, and how can someone who respects Richard Dawkins so admire Christian missionaries and martyrs? Oddly enough, what all of these people have in common is that they “put their money where their mouths are”, and do not apologize for what they see as true. And when you look at the spectacular growth areas in modern Christianity, such as the charismatic and evangelical churches, this is precisely what they do. Confidence, assurance, and a clear message are much more likely to inspire people and win them over than are apology and indecision.
Yet particularly unfortunate in our own time are, first, concerns about fundamentalism; and, secondly, problems about worship styles and liturgy. A fair slice of the most active and successful present-day Christian evangelism is of a fundamentalist character, and as we have seen in previous chapters, fundamentalism is very much a modern phenomenon in Christian history. And especially it is the product of a particular type of American culture. Yes, fundamentalism is simplistic and replete with bad history, bad science, and bad theology; yet there are, perhaps, worse things – such as being ignorant of God. And here I will say something that risks giving apoplexies to some of my academic colleagues: I would rather a person choose to be ignorant of our evolutionary ancestry than to be ignorant of Christ’s teachings. While I am an evolutionist and a passionate lover of science myself, I do feel that we get our priorities mixed up when allegiance to or dissent from a biological theory that has no practical impact whatsoever upon how millions of “ordinary” people worldwide behave towards their fellow-humans is seen as more important than a wider knowledge of Christian morality and redemption.
For when radical and often atheistical evolutionists attack Genesis-based fundamentalism they are rarely selective in their target. It is not just at the first half-dozen chapters of Genesis that they invariably fire their big guns; it is at the whole Bible, New Testament included. For are not the accounts of miraculous healings, resurrection, and immortal souls just as incapable of scientific proof as talk of a six-day creation? Such thinking, indeed, does not accord with the new religion of God-free scientism.
Of course, what theologically, historically, and scientifically aware Christians must do is reach out and try to educate their fellows, and teach them how not – as St Augustine warned regarding the unlearned flat-earthers of over 1,600 years ago – to make themselves look silly before educated non-Christians. But if informed academic and church teaching are of no avail, then let us still at least remain on speaking terms with the biblical fundamentalists. When we face that Great Reckoning which many of us believe will come at the end of our lives, it might better serve, I suspect, to know something of God, than only from which strain of pithecoids we happen to be descended.
And here we come to my second point. Just as we must be confident in acknowledging that at the end of the day there are bigger issues at stake than evolution, and that it is the Christian’s duty to take the faith to all – learned, simple, confused, or just too burdened with daily life to think about complex scientific theories – so we must be careful not to strip our faith of its glorious ancestral culture. For just as some people feel the need to wrestle with “big ideas”, such as God, evolution, cosmology, and philosophical theology in order to develop their spiritual understanding, so many are also helped by great art. Yet one feature of late twentieth-century Christianity is that some of the most dynamic spiritual developments in evangelism have been accompanied by an aesthetic and a style of worship which many find unsatisfying (people who cannot relate to modern pop and rock music, for example).
“Modern” worship is all well and good if that is what happens to bring you to God. And it clearly does so for many, because this is perhaps the biggest “growth industry” in contemporary Christianity, and covers an age spectrum extending from teenagers to pensioners. But just as whole sections of Western society have collectively turned their back on science and its relation to faith, so others have turned their back upon the Christian church’s ancestral liturgy. Of course, this is not new; for earlier Protestant denominations, such as the Quakers, made radical breaks from traditional liturgy in their pursuit of the Holy Spirit, while some innovations, such as Methodist hymn-singing, became a popular and much-loved addition to the liturgy.
The problem today, however, is that many people are put off Christianity, or going to church, if the only accessible places of worship are not to their aesthetic taste. Yes, it is true that our great cathedrals, city churches, and Oxford and Cambridge college chapels (most of which open their doors to visitors) are booming, as people want to partake in Christian worship. Some are what have been styled “Christian atheists”, or what I sometimes call addicts of “AV, BCP, Stanford in C” (Authorized Version of the Bible, Book of Common Prayer, and great church music). For many people love art, symbol, and grandeur, and want them in their lives. Many churchgoers want liturgy, grand music, choirs, organs, and the glorious language of the 1611 Bible and the 1662 Prayer Book, and will often travel miles to get their liturgical “fix” – even if their spiritual views are vague. The Victorian “High Church” and “Anglo-Catholic” churchmen realized this 150 years ago, as witness the magnificent “Puginesque” neo-medieval edifices erected in slum parishes. To people whose lives were bleak and drab, the church could offer more spectacle than the gin-palace – with the added bonus of the prospect of eternal life! Indeed, a similar situation existed in Soviet Russia and other communist-dominated countries of Eastern Europe, where Orthodox and Catholic churches (or at least that small minority of churches which were permitted to continue), with their glittering mosaics, frescoes, chanting, and incense, helped to keep the faith alive and to feed the souls of people whose days were lived out amidst the grey drabness of concrete tower communes, factories, and official Party propaganda.
Yet what is a tragedy today is that when many “Christian atheists” go for their “fix” of full liturgical Eucharist or choral evensong, with sermon, what they hear may not encourage them to go beyond the beautiful words and ceremonial and explore the central message of the Christian faith.
So how do we reclaim our Christian identity when “received opinion” is often so loaded against it? I would suggest that we make a strenuous effort to break the bonds with which ideological secularism, political correctness, postmodern moral paralysis, and multiculturalism have tried to chain us; to risk crossing the intellectual, scientific, and cultural divides that government, the media, and fashionable ideologists have been allowed to impose upon Christian identity, often in the name of “education”. We must be proud of that Christian faith and tradition that lies at the heart of our ancestral civilization, and not apologize for it, be we inspired by fiery preaching, rock music, choral evensong, High Church “bells and smells”, evolution, biblical literalism, or whatever else suits us best as individuals, and brings each one of us closer to God.
Or if we are interested but uncommitted music-, art-, and liturgy-loving “Christian atheists” or agnostics, or cultural refugees from “rock” who might take the sacrament at Eucharist for form’s sake on a Sunday morning while listening to the glorious strains of the Agnus Dei in some cathedral chancel, all well and good. For I would suggest that it is better to be a “Christian atheist” than a God-hating atheist: it is a step in the right direction, for as the Gospels and St Paul’s letters tell us, if we come with open and honest hearts, God will meet us wherever we happen to be, even if our faith is no greater than a tiny mustard seed. But we must not be afraid to invite the “Christian atheists” to move on from their unbelief, and to pour a little life-giving water on the mustard seeds. But at all times we must, clergy and laity, be welcoming, affirming, and loving – to everyone!
But centrally, Christians must always be willing – in the most generous-hearted way – to defend their faith: to challenge myths and secularist theories about history and science, missionaries, and Christianity and warfare, and to remind the world in clear, courteous, yet unequivocal terms that not all religions believe the same things, or evangelize or treat their fellow human beings in the same way.
And so let us take a lesson from our atheist critics, and show them and the world that they are not the only ones who are willing to publicly stand up and declare what they believe.