With all the cultural decay going on around us, it is not surprising that we should see problems within the bosom of the institution called the Church.
The Church confronts an increasingly secular paradigm characterised by burgeoning hedonism, crass materialism and an obsession with power and status that breeds selfishness and exploitation.
In the 20th century, scientific and technological advances as well as trends in humanistic and social scientific thought, seriously diminished the spiritual parameters in western culture.
Long before, Emmanuel Kant had observed that the impact of liberal enlightenment on our spiritual life was such that if someone walked in while you were on your knees praying, you might be profoundly embarrassed.
Much is said about the failings of the Church by which is meant what the Reformation scholars called the Visible Church, organised religious organisations, always to be distinguished from the Invisible Church, the brotherhood of all believers and known only to Christ.
Someone once observed that the Church is a hospital for sick Christians and we are reminded that Christ came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Thus it might be fitting if the Church is full of persons in want of spiritual healing, and who among us are not.
The historic visible church has never been immune to schism, heresy, and moral pollution reflecting the sinful nature of mankind, for it may have been St Augustine who voiced that “nothing straight has ever been created out of the crooked timber of humanity”.
It is not difficult to be cynical about organised religion considering the plethora of denominations springing up all over the place each claiming to have some monopoly on truth and each pastor, apostle, and prophet, most with their qualifying doctorates of divinity, assuming to hear the voice of the one true God. Scandals over the past two decades in almost all sects, not least the Catholic paedophilia scourge, has weakened faith in many of the proclaimers of Christ’s Gospel.
However, he himself said that many would come in his name, hirelings whose own the sheep are not. When Pope Francis ascended the papacy and began his reforms, a friend in Argentina advised him to be careful because the friend warned: “The Borgias are still in the Vatican”, a reference to the infamous family a scion of which (Rodrigo Borgia) became Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503).
As with all mythologies (mythology used purely to mean a theoretical construct), Christian claims to ideological purity and certitude has historically led to gross intolerance and obscurantism of dogma.
The wrongs of the Catholic Inquisition are known. On the Protestant side, it may be less well known that in October 1553 in the theocracy of Geneva, John Calvin executed his opponent Michael Servetus, under what the history text described as, “particularly agonising condition”. Servetus’ sin was that he had dared to disagree with Calvin on the nature of the Holy Trinity and his, Calvin’s, interpretation of the Apostle’ Creed.
Force for good
While Christianity has produced its fair share of abuses and abusers, it has been a tremendous force for good in the world and an agent for the improvement of the human condition. It has produced men and women who have illumined the darkness of their times. What historians call the “the humanitarian revolution” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were driven by persons of deep faith and personal piety.
These included Catholics like Cardinal Newman, Methodists like John Wesley and George Whitfield and others like Lord Shaftesbury, Elizabeth Fry, later Thomas Moody, Dietrich Bonhoffer and in our own day Pentecostal evangelists such as Dr Billy Graham.
Whether we are creatures of God or evolutionary biology or both, man is a spiritual being always in quest of transcendence. In an interesting article entitled The Brains Behind Spirituality, Jonathan Rowson observes that intellectually, the word spirituality “struggles to find coherent expression and therefore lack credibility in the public domain”. Very often, it seems to be merely a synonym for consciousness.
One does not have to be religious to know that moral sensibility and ethical consciousness are a prerequisite of the good life. In spite of the growing secularism in British society, a report entitled Post-Religious Britain: The Faith of the Faithless by the think tank, Theos, found that only nine per cent of Britons were “resolutely atheist”.
The Christian Church is central to the more edifying narrative of Western civilisation. As a guide to the moral life, the Church of Christ and the Christian mythology is arguably still the best guide to the moral life. Its mysteries, a God who is both human and divine, who rose from the dead and ascended to the Father may still be comprehensible only through faith, to those who have pierced what the Reformation scholars called “the dark night of the soul”, but it is incumbent on all Christians to try to live in accordance with the moral tenets of Christ’s gospel.
• Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and social commentator; email [email protected]
