Apostle of doubt

One staple of our national comedy is that someone must always fill the role of ‘Barmy Bishop’. While at Durham David Jenkins occupied the position, as perhaps in recent years has Rowan Williams. Certainly Richard Holloway recalls the morning while Bishop of Edinburgh when he woke to discover he had become the incumbent.

His liberal views on women priests and gay rights, as well as vocal doubts over the literal claims of Christianity (culminating in his 1999 book Godless Morality) caused derision in the press and eventually made his position as a Bishop and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church untenable. He stepped down in 2000 and now, approaching his eighties, has published an unsparing and moving memoir of his life to that date, Leaving Alexandria. So what is his faith now? I ask him over coffee in his Edinburgh home.

‘I’m dismissed as an atheist,’ he replies in his resonant, Scottish lilt. ‘I’m not an atheist. It’s too certain and clear a position. I would describe myself as in a permanent state of expectant agnosticism really.’

He mentions that he preached this past Sunday in Old Saint Paul’s, the church near Waverley Station where he spent some of the happiest years of his ministry. So what sermon did this expectant agnostic deliver? ‘I preached about how God hates religion.’

There remains a ‘bandwidth’ within which he feels able to preach. And though that bandwidth puts him at the farthest edge of conventional theology, it has in recent years brought him a far larger following of people from both in and outside religion.

The problem, he explains, is that religion ‘tends to scientise itself — to jump into truth claims’. In doing so it is doing exactly what a lot of atheist scientists do to the world. ‘They think they can package it.’ A product of the double-whammy of Darwin and historical criticism, he quotes Wittgenstein: to be religious ‘is to know that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter’.