He is asked if faith in God is important to him. "If you are asking, do I drop to my knees and pray for guidance, no. But do I have faith and is it important, yes. My own faith is there, it's not always the rock that perhaps it should be.”

Hmmm. Surely praying for God’s guidance is a basic part of Christian faith, and nothing to be ashamed of. He is trying hard to sound pro-God but not in a Blair-like way. And by saying that his faith is ‘not always the rock that perhaps it should be’ he is trying hard to sound calmly and self-critically religious. I recall him using a very similar phrase a few years ago, when asked how keen a churchgoer he was: he said he didn’t go as often as perhaps he should. And I remember thinking: if you feel you]]> Theo Hobson 2009-11-06T14:45:47+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/faithbased/5507153/staging-hell.thtml I’ve just seen this fascinating Times article on a reinvention of the medieval morality play by American evangelicals.

In the run-up to Halloween, some churches put on ‘hell house’ plays for teenagers, acted by slightly older teenagers. They are not scary fun, but dramatic sermons about the consequences of sinful lifestyles, intended to terrify.

I have mixed feelings about this. I object to the moralism of the message, and to the attempt to scare kids into piety, but I like the medium. It is nice to know that theatre retains its superior power to move us, even in Hollywood-land. Liberal churches should respond, with plays that seek to offer more rounded, thoughtful and honest views of the world. Theatre, including religious theatre, should move us intellectually as well as emotionally. I think theatre ought to be central to what churches do – let this be a spur to better efforts.

The paintings are good too. I like this tough (but strangely attractive) nun, by Velazquez. She is clearly ready to use this crucifix as a weapon on anyone who gets in her holy way. This very Catholic painting reminded me of a very Protestant poem, ‘Conscience’ by George Herbert (written at about the same time as the painting). The poet addresses the tempter who assails him, warning him that he has:

Some wood and nails to make a staffe or bill

For those that

What explains Rome’s dynamic aura, and the C of E’s lack of it? In a word, or two words, sacramental exoticism. Look at the buzz of media interest that St Therese’s relics have generated. The thought of a huge papal carnival next year will tip many Anglo-Catholics Romewards. Catholicism is simply better at the public expression of faith. And it’s profiting from a new public appetitie for spectacle.

Can the Church of England develop a new style of public sacramentalism, with which to rival Rome? No: an established Church has thrown in its lot with the rituals of a declining empire state. If the appetite for celebrating Christian nationhood dies, a huge aspect of this Church’s life is over. It cannot really escape an apologetic, hand-wringing image, awkwardly presiding over services for soldiers killed in a war that it tried to stop.

Of course the theme of sacramentalism, which really means the cultural expression of Christianity, will be central to any such book, but MacCulloch has a consistently sure touch here. He is enlightening on various aspects of the overlap of religion and ‘the arts’. For example his account of the emergence of the oratorio, which has one foot in church and another in opera, is lucid. I also liked his brief focus on Max Ernst's painting (accompanying this post): he uses it to suggest that what seems like irreverence is seldom straightforward in Christian tradition.

There is a nice description of a topical Catholic, St Therese of Lisieux. This ‘savagely self-punishing teenager’ is a good example of female assertiveness throughout nineteenth-century Christianity. When she accosted the pope, demanding early entry into the Carmelite Order, ‘the hapless pontiff was understandably alarmed,]]> Theo Hobson 2009-10-19T11:29:58+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/faithbased/5438328/alpha-minus.thtml Does God exist? Yes, no or probably?

Is this attempt at Christian communication good, bad or indifferent?

To my mind, the Alpha Course poster is very bad theology. In fact, it is harming my daughter’s idea of religion. She is having an eight-year-old flirtation with atheism, thanks to some know-it-all mini-Dawkins boy in her class. When we passed this poster the other morning she said, ‘There ought to be a Probably Not.’ Pretty much what Dawkins would say (he’d opt for ‘almost certainly not’).

My point is that this framing of the God-question strengthens the case for atheism. It makes God seem a pseudo-scientific proposition, for which evidence is needed. The implication is that believers have a special way of knowing that he really does exist – come to the Alpha Course and find out more.

This is a bad way of approaching the concept of God. They’d do better to put up a bit of scripture: how about the Lord's Prayer? Last year their campaign was much better. The poster read: ‘If God did exist, what would you ask him?’ This cunningly put the idea of God in the agnostic’s mind,]]> Theo Hobson 2009-10-14T10:08:26+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/faithbased/5399753/a-very-digested-read.thtml I’ve now read a big chunk of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new book, A History of Christianity. It’s hard to get into: one feels a bit daunted by dry detail, especially in the unfamiliar (to me) territory of the Syrian and African churches. But worth it.

Perhaps the biggest story of the first five or six centuries is the disunity over the Trinity. The idea of the incarnation was too strange and scandalous; it failed to stabilize, become coherent. This endless Middle Eastern dispute was the root cause of Islam: for Mohammed the idea of an incarnate God had proved itself to be an endless source of muddle and strife. Let’s have a version of this revealed-monotheism business that will unite people! There is a good little sketch of Islam’s subtly different appeal to the religious mind. Conversion is largely a matter of literary aestheticism: the power of Koranic poetry fuses beauty and truth.

Another thing that struck me is the non-inevitability of Rome’s rise. It was thanks to a few Frankish kings that the papacy gained the political thwack to defy Constantinople. If Clovis and sons had opted for Arianism or paganism, things might]]> Theo Hobson 2009-10-06T16:03:18+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/faithbased/5381001/will-macculloch-elaborate-about-himself.thtml I’ve just bought Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new brick - sorry, book, A History of Christianity. I thought I might do a gradual review here, reflecting on a new chunk each week, for as long as it takes.  

So far I’ve read the introduction. Here he restates his religious position. In his previous book he said that his viewpoint “is neither confessional nor dogmatically Christian”, which seems to imply, tentatively, that it is loosely Christian. In the present book he calls himself “a candid friend of Christianity”. He explains that he “appreciate[s] the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence.” Maybe, he says, his position could be called “an apophatic form of the Christian faith”. Apophatic theology is that which highlights the unknowability of God, which makes a virtue of vagueness.  

When I interviewed him for the Spectator five years ago, he very slightly elaborated: “To some extent I’ve withdrawn from the Christian package – I no longer have doctrinal commitments”. He also said that Anglicanism was at its best when it was most doctrinally loose, and warned that the Roman Catholic love of orthodoxy was illusory]]> Theo Hobson 2009-09-30T13:17:28+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/faithbased/5361386/what-the-reaction-to-popes-visit-tells-us-about-the-church-of-england.thtml There’s a good piece by Andrew Brown in the Guardian, on what has changed since the last papal visit in 1982. The C of E has lost a lot of confidence, he says, and this is related to our loss of imperial confidence. He quotes Enoch Powell in 1982, warning that a papal visit would imply that the Queen could not be "on earth the supreme governor of the Church of England". No one worries about this any more, says Brown.
 
The really big change since 1982, it seems to me, is that Powell’s form of Anglicanism has gone; it died with him. I mean the sort of Anglicanism that really believes in establishment, in much the same way that Americans believe in their national idea. Powell was the last public figure who held that our liberties are tied up with this institution, and that its discriminatory edge could not be safely reformed away. Who believes this now? A few Tories (such as Andrew Roberts, recently) warn against reforming the Act of Settlement, but this is mere pragmatism; they lack Powell’s sense of a Protestant national vision.
 
And this change, the]]> Theo Hobson 2009-09-24T17:40:45+00:00