Lent II - Faith, Hope and Clarity

So God loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3.16).

Unsurprisingly, one of the reasons people give for not going to church is that they don’t believe in God. They certainly have no interest in the minutiae of Church teaching which, over the centuries, has at best seemed esoteric; and has at worst led to such a bloody history of heresy-hunting and liquidation of anyone with suspect beliefs.

There must always have been a wide variety of responses to what Mr Atlee (not a keen theologian) used to call the ‘mumbo-jumbo’ of the Christian faith. Even back in the day when scullery-maids were frogmarched to church three-abreast on a Sunday morning, each armed with a shiny sixpence and The Book of Common Prayer, there can’t have been absolute uniformity of orthodoxy or fervour. Like David Cameron, who famously described his own faith as ‘coming and going like the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns’, Anglicans have come to prize a certain theological vagueness, which some find liberating, while others are driven to distraction, and finally find refuge in the greater certainty of Rome, or of one of the many varieties of church offering a diet of Biblical conservatism.

If we are to be clear about what is commended to us in St John’s famous line about ‘believing in the only-begotten Son of God’, we must first be clear that religious faith is not simply or solely a matter of personal intellectual willingness to believe in ‘six impossible things before breakfast’. While we do obviously need to own our beliefs, and engage our adult brains when considering deep questions, it is nonetheless the case that faith is corporate (a game for two or more players): we pool our resources and support each other when faith is lacking, while stopping very far short of the group hysteria to which cult-members are prone. Church is as much about standing united with those who experience the same joys and sorrows as ours, and the same ebb-and-flow of faith, as it is about agreeing with every syllable of each of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion.

This is why the great Creeds of the faith paint a picture of reality-under-God in deliberately broad brush-strokes: what you believe by Christ’s resurrection or his virginal conception might be hugely different from what I believe about them, but the phraseology used is sufficiently capacious to accommodate each of us with integrity – and to allow room for everyone else who stands somewhere between us on the continuum of meaning.

This is as it should be, especially in an ordinary Church of England parish, where one’s responsibilities are to the whole community, not just to the crowd that happens to like the vicar, the choir, or the preaching. After all, just because people do not have particularly well-formed religious views, does not mean to say that they do not enjoy a sense of belonging or common purpose; or that they do not benefit from meeting with others in a beautiful space, to read improving texts, hear intelligent discourse, and raise the roof with lusty communal singing, the like of which is now available only at football matches and in churches. (Just recall those dismal secular funerals where the congregation is miserably reduced to Spotify or silence.)

All of these benefits aside, isn’t there an irreducible minimum belief for attending church? Surely one has to believe something? It’s certainly hard to imagine anyone setting foot in a church without having a basic respect for the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. Only a fully paid-up Christian might say that the way of Christ is the way to God, but even those with less doctrinal clarity might recognise that Jesus’ life is an absolutely exemplary model of human living, leading us into the heart of reality, what Christians would call the Kingdom of God.

For whoever comes to church, and with whatever reason, there are two fundamental and complementary dispositions at work, each exercising a sort of gravitational pull. First, there is a lifting of heart and mind upward, a searching for the overarching idea and ‘big story’ to give our reality its meaning. And whether or not we yet believe the full theological menu of the Christian faith, we do nevertheless have the story of Jesus (and the promise of the Holy Spirit) to provide some of the skeleton and scaffold to strengthen and support our life. Second, there is in church a digging-down of roots into the compost that time and experience have formed within us. As even Philip Larkin realised, Church-going answers ‘a hunger in [ourselves] to be more serious’, offering ‘a serious house on serious earth,’ one that is ‘proper to grow wise in’.

We may not immediately (or always, or ever) subscribe to the full belief that Christ is the Incarnate Word of God, or that he wrought miracles or was raised from the dead on the third day. But we can still affirm that he exemplified love, encouraged hope, and enriched life; so much that we find in our own belief in hope, life and love more than enough reason to step inside the church and join the throng. As we stand beneath a roof that has sheltered our forebears in Appleton for eight centuries, we will find that simply being there will so re-orient our living that we may begin to feel that we are no longer perishing in a pointless consumerist wasteland, but starting to live a life that has a quality that one could plausibly expect to carry us on into the eternal heart of whatever, in fact, is.