Quiet Day: Fareham Deanery – Saturday 13th March
Theme: The Kairos Cycle
Introduction
I am never entirely sure what people expect from a Quiet Day. The best ones, I suppose, are those that give some space to be apart, in company with other people, with a minimum of conversation, but not oppressively silent, and with some guided thoughts from a speaker. I have to confess that I am no spiritual athlete; which means that you will not be getting heavenly aerobics from me. My own life is made up of various rhythms; my faith has changed little in substance since I was a growing lad, largely because I had the good fortune to be brought up spiritually by parents and clergy who encouraged me to ask questions; much of what has happened since then has been a matter of adjusting to new situations, which include places of work, as well as the heights – and depths – that life has given me. My life of prayer is simple and rather threadbare, impatient with complexity, and because I have never had a good memory for learning things by heart, I prefer a basic core of material to use when I pray, both on my own and with others, rather than delight in what can be an overdose of alternatives.
So what should I speak about? In the end, I have decided to explore the four stages of the ‘Kairos’ Cycle – and if you don’t know what these are, you certainly will by the end of the day. They are, at one level, the stages that are about a fresh strategy for change in the diocese, with roadshows round the deaneries (sorry about Fareham being last, but it will militate against any claim of favouritism about where the ‘bish’ lives!). But they are also, it seems to me, about fundamental questions that concern how we make sense of our life in God. We shall begin with ‘the experience of new questions’; go on with exploration ‘our resources’; continue with ‘reflection on our context’; and end with ‘reconstruction - action’. To help us on our way, we shall be using a particular figure each time in order, to provide some focus – and, perhaps, to keep the level of episcopal waffle down to a minimum.
First Address: Experience: New Questions – Evelyn Underhill
New Questions are nothing new! They can be alarming, as when an unexpected difficulty hits a community – unlike the expected ones, which often have a pattern to them. Of course, as a community of faith, as the Easter people, we are supposed to believe that the old can give birth to the new; and that problems can be turned into opportunities. It’s just that we don’t always approach them in that positive frame of mind. Today’s new questions are never exactly the same as those of a bygone age, but perhaps figures from the not too distant past can provide a bit of inspiration.
Evelyn Underhill was born in 1875 in London and died in 1941. She was brought up in a conventional London professional home. But there are aspects to her life that were quite unconventional. She was never really taken in by her traditional ‘CofE’ upbringing. In 1893, she became a student at what was then the Ladies Department at King’s College, London. Then she became engaged to a barrister, Hubert Moore, and wanted to become a Roman Catholic. But the conservative policy of Pope Pius X, which made life increasingly hard for ‘modernists’, convinced her that this was not the place for her. There followed a phase in which she was not attached to any church. She wrote an important book, entitled ‘Mysticism’, in 1911, in which she explored the area of religious experience; and this was followed by a series of forewords for the publication of devotional classics from the late medieval English tradition, including ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ (1912). During the First World War, she worked in Naval Intelligence; she was greatly affected by seeing the war-wounded coming back in their droves from the front.
In 1921, she finally decided publicly to embrace the Church of England, and in 1927 she was made a Fellow of King’s College, London. By this time, she was well-known for her retreats and addresses. Perhaps her best-known book was ‘Worship’ which appeared in 1936, the year in which she gave a retreat on the Lord’s Prayer, the text of these addresses being published four years later entitled ‘Abba’. She enjoyed something of a position of fame after her death, but then went out of fashion. A more balanced picture is now emerging, and her real strengths and originality are being allowed to come through.
For my money, there are two areas of ‘New Questions’ about which we can learn from her. One concerns belief, and other concerns authority. She knew well what was to live with a crisis of belief, because she refused to become a Christian in the full sense until she was forty-six, and in that sense is perhaps more typical of today’s Church than her own. When I look at the groups of confirmation candidates that I come across in the diocese, I am usually faced with a motley crew of folk; and it is rare for me not to have to baptize at least one of them. Evelyn Underhill learnt about belief outside rather than inside conventional Christianity. All that work on the mystical traditions of other faiths, as well as the medieval spiritual writers, may seem cosy to us now, but it was anything like that then. And if you add her First World War experience, the result might be a total rejection of the faith – like the many men who came back from the trenches, on both sides of the conflict, determined that the churches had let them down, and that God, if he did exist at all, was to be found somewhere else. She came down in favour of the Christian faith, almost as if she had tried everything else, an ‘in spite of’ rather than a ‘because of’ journey of faith; and the Anglican version gave her space to be a questing, thinking woman, with a genuine ministry.
Perhaps it was this strange journey towards belief that made her approach to authority so carefully expressed. For her, if belief was to be hard-fought over, then authority could not be something one assumed either. In one of her addresses on the Lord’s Prayer, she summarises the second part of the prayer not in terms of what is ‘given’ but in what are human needs: ‘men have three wants, which only God can satisfy. They need food, for they are weak and dependent. They need forgiveness, for they are sinful. They need guidance, for they are puzzled. Give-Forgive-Lead-Deliver.’
For Evelyn Underhill, the Christian faith – if it means anything – is about human need; the need for faith, hope and love. Of course, it is possible to exaggerate human need, and I suspect that we are probably doing this in our own particular age. We often express spiritual and ecclesiastical needs in terms of what we want, what is sometimes called the ‘for "disciples" read "consumers"’ synedrome! Need, of course, is not the same as wish; and perhaps we are going overboard is setting up our stall in the religious marketplace in terms of what is attractive and inviting (which the Christian faith certainly is), without at the same time emphasizing that it is also both challenging and demanding. To use her own language of the Lord’s Prayer, our need for food is the natural consequence of being weak and dependent; our need for forgiveness results from being sinful; and our need for guidance is because we are ‘puzzled’ – a strange word, and yet one which describes us as confused by falsehood, not knowing which direction to take, and often taking the wrong one.
Perhaps we should take all three together, and not just think of food, or guidance, but realize that sinfulness is real. Perhaps what these three petitions do is locate us in time: food for today, forgiveness for yesterday, and guidance in the future. All of which may make us look at ourselves, our own age, and the scary questions that hit the Church even now. What of belief, and authority? I wonder if these are far more fundamental to who we are and what we stand for than the many other questions that are picked up in our own internal conversations and rows, or by the media at large. There are new and scary questions about both that are alive and kicking in today’s world. The popular view is that it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you are true to yourself – which sounds attractive, but ends up in a kind of emptiness. The popular view is that you must choose what you will accept as authoritative, and only that will do – which again sounds attractive, but ends up with a free-for-all, and a society that lacks a sense of coherence. As a Church, we mirror both these tendencies: we frequently pay lip service to the historic Creeds, when in fact what we want to do with our lives is to be true to ourselves, rather than to the Lord himself – which might be more demanding. And we are in a tangle about authority, as witness the common view, for example, that you can only have a bishop with whom you can agree on absolutely everything – which is manifestly impossible, and utterly nonsensical.
So where does this leave us? The scary, new questions will always come, for that is part of human nature, human history. Evelyn Underhill can help us, however, over belief, in her own struggles with the reality of human need, and in the area of trust as fundamental to all relationships. On authority, she may help us by making us ready to see our own (and others’) superficiality: ‘we prefer to live upon the surface and ignore the deep’, she says in her opening address on the Lord’s Prayer. It is sometimes painful to be criticised personally, or for our Church to be debunked publicly. But to live in depth means shifting many of the things we get worked up about away from the superficial, towards deeper, more enduring realities; from the row about the way we did the flowers to what the beauty of God’s holiness actually is; from the latest explosion about gays to what love and friendship in Christ really means; from the burning question of which eucharistic prayer to use to what being with God is really about.
Quotations: from Underhill
‘Men (and women) have three wants, which only God can satisfy. They need food, for they are weak and dependent. They need forgiveness, for they are sinful. They need guidance, for they are puzzled. Give-Forgive-Lead-Deliver’.
‘We prefer to live upon the surface, and ignore the deep’
Questions:
How do people become aware of these needs; and what do I make of them?
Am I prepared to live not superficially, but in depth?
Second Address: Exploration: Our Resources – Lancelot Andrewes
I shall never forget the experience of moving from Bishopswood, the old See House, to what we decided to call Bishopsgrove, in September 1997. It was not like the (temporary) move from Guildford two years earlier, because this time, it was not just us and our effects and furniture, to say nothing of all my books: it was the office, and its paperwork and equipment, as well as the chapel accoutrements. As we looked into old cupboards, we found all sorts of things, some of it useful, like essential records, some of it no longer of any significance, except for sentimental purposes, like the embossing stamp with ‘Bishopswood’ on it, that went back to the time of Neville Lovett, the first Bishop. It was far more of an upheaval than any of us could have imagined, made even more demanding by the need to ensure that everything was as up and running as possible at the new house in Osborn Road.
As I recall that set of experiences, I think back to another journey we made as a family. It was January 1983, and we were leaving Manchester, where I was University Chaplain, to live in the Midwest of the USA for five months, at the University of Notre Dame. As we climbed up the steps to the aeroplane that was to take us to Heathrow, and transfer to another that was then to take us to Chicago, and yet one more, that was to take us out towards South Bend in what for us was the early hours of the next morning, we were aware that all we had was a certain amount of luggage – and ourselves. And for obvious reasons, what we took with us had to be only what was essential, which meant clothes, a few mementoes, and (as I was going to teach) some few books, though I have to say that I came back with rather more.
These two stories illustrate different attitudes to how we use our resources. In the first, we could take almost everything we wanted, although we did discard a certain amount; in the second, all we could take was the bare minimum. But the point is that in both instances, we felt insecure, though admittedly exhilarated; and in neither case was staying where we were an option. The Church Commissioners had already decided to move me before I took up post; and I had agreed to go to Notre Dame University as a Visiting Professor on my own volition.
You are, perhaps, ahead of me! Yes, the Church is in the same position, of not being able to stand still, settle down, and effectively go to sleep, or, indeed, be in denial about a system that is creaking. What we are living through at the moment is just one more time of change. The scary questions are asked, and they are beginning to be identified, not in what they say on the surface, like when should the services be, but deep down, about belief and trust, and authority that meets real needs. The next stage is to look at the resources of the tradition in which we stand. For some of us, that may be a bit like the move from Bishopswood to Bishopsgrove, taking most of our stuff, and putting it all into new receptacles – with the added attraction of a much nicer chapel! For others, it will be more like the Manchester-USA journey, where we take as little as possible, in order to be able to travel light. I expect that most people here will identify with one or other of these. But keep hold of the question of resources; it is important because it has to involve selection. Even when we went from Bishopswood to Bishopsgrove, there were things on arrival that had to be discarded. Things never stay the same, nor should they.
Of all the people who illustrate the selective use of resources in the Anglican tradition, perhaps one of the finest is Lancelot Andrewes. Born in 1555 in West London, he was educated at Merchant Taylors School, and from there went to Pembroke Hall (as it was then called), Cambridge, where he attracted attention for the brilliance of his mind at a time when the Church of England was deeply divided (‘twas ever thus!) between those who wanted it to move in a more Protestant direction, and who regarded the Reformation as only half-finished, and those who were content with what had been achieved, but who wanted to restore some of the things that had disappeared. Andrewes remained as a Fellow at Cambridge, but in 1589 was also made Vicar of St Giles’, Cripplegate, London, where his preaching (already well-known) came to the notice of influential people. In 1601, he became Dean of Westminster; he supervised the funeral of Elizabeth I, and went on to take part in the coronation of James I. Bishoprics followed: Chichester in 1605, Ely in 1609, and Winchester in 1619. After his death in 1626, 96 of his main sermons were collected together and published; I have one of the early editions in my study, and am proud to possess it.
Sermons, of course, are out of date when they have been preached, and some are even out of date before as well! But these preachments, alongside his other works, show Andrewes as an unusually brilliant and perceptive person. This is not just because of the facts that he could hold together at one and the same time; he was known for throwing a biblical text in as many different directions as possible and getting more and more out of it. He was also a master of the imagination in getting across deep truths to a mixed audience. King James loved to hear him on the great festivals, and it is these sermons that largely make up the collection of the ‘96’. Although one can get lost in the twists and turns of some of his arguments, there is a sense of wholeness and integrity between what he preached and what he prayed. His Private Devotions (‘Preces Privatae’) were studied just over a century ago, and were shown to be full of direct quotations from the sermons, or parallels with parts of them. There are not many people of whom that could be said!
Living as he did at a time of transition, Andrewes knew the resources of tradition well. He was not prepared to make do with a simplistic ‘biblical’ view of Christian truth, nor was he prepared to sell out to a view of tradition for tradition’s sake. This is one of the main polarities in the Church today, and it is about more than the Evangelical-Catholic divide. In 1617, he travelled north to Edinburgh, to help King James I celebrate the 50th anniversary of his coronation as King James VI of Scotland. In his sermon at Pentecost in the newly-refurbished chapel at Holyrood, he set down his own approach to what we might call a theory of spiritual resources: ‘This Booke chiefly (meaning the Bible); but in a good part also, by the books of the ancient fathers, in whom the scent of this ointment was fresh, and the temper true; on whose writings it lieth thick, and we thence strike it off, and gather it safely.’
Like much of what Andrewes has to say, we must savour it, and take it slowly. But his message is plain: the Bible first, but also the writings of the early Church, because of their nearness to the time of the first Christians; the bible has to be interpreted. But he sees the process of Christian nourishment in imaginative rather than cold process term; think of that image of the oil as the inspiration of the Spirit. The Bible, imaginatively read, in the context of living worship, pours out the oil of the Spirit, and does so over the writings of the early fathers of the Church, and so on down to us; and our nourishment results from scraping it off, as with a knife. Andrewes does not dictate a wooden process: he paints a picture, and draws us into it.
And so it is with much of his preaching. He shakes the text, tossing it to the four corners of the earth; he brings in short, punchy quotations from the Fathers, usually balancing West (Augustine) with East (John Chrysostom). He will use almost flip expressions, such as the eucharistic drink as ‘the top of our mirth’. And invariably, we will be led, section by section, through a rich argument. Not the way to win an impatient, modern, time-conscious congregation with a ten-minute ‘Thought for the Day’; but a way, nonetheless, to explore in depth what it means to use the resources of tradition in the here and now.
How does Andrewes speak to us, in our desire to explore the resources at our disposal, as we seek to help the Holy Spirit renew the Church? One answer Andrewes provides is not to be overwhelmed by the past, nor to ignore it. Every age has to make its own selection, and mistakes are always going to be made. For example, in an Ash Wednesday sermon, it is obvious that Andrewes would have liked the custom of ashing to have survived the English Reformation, albeit in simplified form; but it didn’t, and so he alludes to it gently as a sign of ‘returning to the Lord’. For Andrewes, there is no point in pretending that we are cut off from the past, otherwise a severe loss of collective memory results, a collective amnesia. But nor must we do and say what we have always done and said just because that is the way things are. Andrewes had an enquiring, probing mind. And he had enough pastoral sense, too, to realize that a proper framework was needed, hence the continued allusions to the Prayer Book. In our day, it is perhaps necessary now to take proper stock
of Common Worship, and to learn its disciplines and freedoms, rather than discard it in favour either of what another Church does, or of nothing at all. But that holds true, too, of the rest of our life together; what emerges from the present time of ferment will not please everyone, and, as before, mistakes will happen. Perhaps Andrewes can be allowed the last word, from his 1612 Pentecost Sermon, where he looks in almost iconic fashion at the baptism of Christ as a manifestation of the Trinity, not long ago at the Jordan, but taking place now, among us, in us, through us: ‘The Father in the voice, the Son in the flood, the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove.’ Here is a selective, focused, and very particular resourcing, if ever we needed it –
for any journey, of the baptismal life. We are first and foremost baptised into Christ, and only then, some of us, ordained, or commissioned, to different forms of ministry. What we – and God in Trinity – make of our baptism has always yet to be discovered.
Quotations: from Andrewes
‘This Book (i.e. the Bible) chiefly; but in a good part also, by the books of the ancient fathers, in whom the scent of this ointment was fresh, and the temper true; on whose writings it lieth thick, and we thence strike if off, and gather it safely’.
(Of the Baptism of Christ) ‘The Father in voice, the Son in the flood, and the Holy Spirit in the shape of a dove.’
Questions:
What do I use apart from the scriptures, as authoritative for my faith, and the way I live it out?
How can I related to my baptismal life to the life of the Trinity?
Third Address: Our Context – F.D. Maurice
You would be surprised – or perhaps you would not! – at what gets back to bishops. The likely figures are the most cynical clergy, who seem invariably to be remarkably naïve in thinking that bishops don’t seem to know what goes on. A case in point was a diocesan synod a few years ago on the Isle of Wight. When Grace Davie, a lecturer in Sociology from Exeter University, came to address us on patterns of religious life in this country, looking at where our strengths (still) lay, what is enduring, what is weak (it is by no means all fading away). At the end, someone was overheard remarking, ‘well, evangelism seems to be out, and sociology in!’
Nothing could be further from the truth. You can’t do any evangelism without understanding the terrain you are in. That holds true as much for a missionary in northern Nigeria as in the sunny estates of Fareham today. If you look at the way Jesus’ teaching had an impact on the communities around him, you will see how seriously he took their institutions. For example, one of the main features of the gospels is how, after the Galilee ministry, Jesus knew that he had to face down Jerusalem. Nothing he said or did would have any lasting significance until he went there. And I like to think that, from the top of the Transfiguration mountain in Galilee, he was able to see Jerusalem itself, that is, until the mists descended on him and the three disciples with them. To put it in bald terms, you cannot have effective evangelism without some sociology, without some knowledge of the structures and history of local life. When we first moved to Fareham in October 1995, I spent a good time not just getting my feet under the table (after ensuring that the table was up in the first place!), but finding out about the diocese; how the land lay, the history and character of its very different communities; to say nothing of the special nature of the Isle of Wight, to which anyone with Viking blood relishes traveling because it involves crossing water.
Experiencing new questions does indeed give us cause to think and to pray; and that should lead us to explore the resources of our tradition, expecting not straightforward answers, but a conviction that the Spirit does indeed speak to every age, with the force of that tradition as a constant driving force. But the next phase is to reflect on our context, in order to understand it better. That may mean dirtying our hands with some sociology, so that notions of evangelism look a little less clean. But our words, our actions, above all our prayers, do not live in a vacuum. I am always struck by this as I move constantly round this small and sociologically varied diocese, where what happens in Crofton has to be different from Bucklands, in Portsmouth, which in turn has to differ from Brighstone, in West Wight. But the praying heart of each community is still united to every other praying community; and we must never let go of that truth.
So where can we turn for some help with context? We could do a lot worse than F.D. Maurice, one of the greatest figures of the nineteenth century Church. Born in 1805 in Lowestoft, he was the son of a Unitarian minister; and while mother and sisters all became evangelical Anglicans, the delicately minded Frederick left Cambridge because he could not subscribe to the 39 Articles of Religion, a requirement in those days. A later move to Oxford settled his mind, and he was ordained, though his questing spirit was to remain in him through a remarkable ministry at Lincoln’s Inn, London, where he served as Chaplain from 1846, which he combined with a professorship at King’s College, London. It was from the pulpit of Lincoln’s Inn that his greatest sermons were preached, and it proved a significant base for someone who could never have been contained by the parochial ministry. He died in 1872.
In many ways, the key to Maurice’s thinking lies in his move from Unitarianism, in those days a stronger dissenting tradition than it is now, to the Church of England. He believed in the goodness of God, and was struck by the need both to preach and to put into practice what the Christian faith is about. He befriended a number of Christian Socialists, who were anxious that the new waves of social thinking should be christianized, and not left to drift into agnosticism, or a position where Christianity could be ignored altogether. For him education was essential if society was to improve, and with Charles Kingsley, he founded the Working Men’s Club in Russell Square. ‘We have been dosing our people with religion when what they need is not that but the living God’ – is probably the saying by him that is most often quoted. It provides something of a window into his soul; the ‘living God’ lives not in a separate religious compartment, but in our day-to-day existence. One of the hallmarks of Maurice and his colleagues was the way they challenged the commonly held assumption that competition is invariably good, and even necessary for a community to thrive. But at the same time, they rejected the extreme position taken by the ‘Chartist’ movement among the urban poor.
Maurice, however, was no mere ‘do-gooder’. In 1848, he preached a course of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer at Lincoln’s Inn that still reads freshly; and one can benefit from them hugely, even without any knowledge of the revolutions taking place in different parts of Europe: Palermo turned against its Bourbon King, and the barricades went up in Paris, leading to the abdication of King Louis Philippe. A Chartist demonstration took place in London on April 10th, which caused Queen Victoria to leave the capital. Maurice tried to enroll as a special constable – but was turned down!
As we turn to the sermons on the Lord’s Prayer preached through February and March of that fateful year, we get a glimpse into his wider thinking. There are some real gems, especially near the start: ‘the Paternoster….may be committed to memory quickly, but it is slowly learnt by heart.’ Here is a mind that looks beyond the surface meaning of things, and realizes that this prayer contains the very heart and essence of the gospel. When it comes to the petition, ‘thy kingdom come’, which was preached on February 27th, only days after the scenes in Paris that led to the downfall of the French monarchy, he remarks: ‘We have reached this petition of the Lord’s Prayer at a time which would seem to give it special emphasis and significance.’ For Maurice, all the kingdoms of this world stand judged, but the response of the Christian is not to bury our heads in the sand; it is to face down what is wrong, in the small and specific ways that are ours in our particular context, and at the same time point to the limited character of the social institutions that we have inherited. It is not for nothing that his best-known work, a lengthy defence of the Anglican position, Prayer Book and all, is called ‘The Kingdom of Christ.’
All of this gives us some rich pickings as we try to make sense of the world in which we are set today. We cannot use Maurice’s observations as a gauge, but we can certainly use his principles. Secularism had marched on since then, pushing the Church to a more sidelined position, from where, however, we can speak and act – and pray – with a sense of mission and spiritual seriousness. People may go to Church less frequently than they used to, but Sunday employment and leisure, broken homes, and the many other pressures on week-ends, including employment patterns, are all bound to impact on worship-attendance. That might ask questions about more week-day worship, and perhaps also how we use our church schools as important access points. We still have contacts with many people ‘out there’, and we need to be more aware of them than we are. For my money, Maurice’s priority on education is an abiding one, and mixes well with the present Government’s commitment to work with the Church in the area of schools. Education will always be a priority for the gospel community founded by the teacher of Nazareth! But it needs to be fed by an understanding of the Church far removed from the ‘holy ghetto of the doctrinally sound’ that I sometimes hear in the near-distance at some church meetings – and synods.
All this takes us into new territory, and deeper into the mind of F.D. Maurice. We are not to look at our context and then, after identifying a few trendy causes, make a few noises about them, feel affirmed by the media as a result, and then revert to type! For Maurice, prayer and action walk side-by-side. The things he has to say about the essentially fragile nature of the world as we know it were nourished by a profound contemplation on the values of the kingdom of God, whose coming Jesus inaugurates. The last thing I want is, in Maurice’s own words, to ‘dose people with religion’ – when what they really need is the living God, in all his richness, fullness, demands, challenges – and mercy.
Quotations: from Maurice
‘We have been dosing our people with religion when what they need is not that but the living God’.
‘The Paternoster … may be committed to memory quickly, but it is slowly learnt by heart’.
Questions:
Am I really faithful, or merely religious?
Am I prepared to go beyond the words, and discussions about them, in order to find out what they actually mean?
Fourth Address: Reconstruction and Action – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Every February, the Bishop’s Staff go away for a few days to pray, talk, reflect, and plan for the coming year. A regular feature of this encounter is to discuss a book – which (hopefully) we will all have read. We always try to choose something outside the well-beaten tracks of Church and theology. A few years ago, it was Jonathan Glover’s ‘Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century’. It made quite an impression on all of us, chronicling wars, dictatorships, and the collapse of Europe on two significant occasions. It also brought home to us just why historic institutions – and even the notion of authority itself – have come in for such a hammering. This may explain, in part, why newspapers deconstruct our institutions almost by the day: it is a climate of opinion, and many people perhaps feel reassured that this is the case. The Church to some extent shares in this collective sense of blame. And a good, juicy scandal is a reminder of the common expectation that we are here trying to be perfect (and therefore get into trouble when we manifestly aren’t), instead of being here in order to cope with being imperfect (which is what the gospel is actually about).
As I consider some of these features of the contemporary landscape, I begin to wonder where all this might lead. Experiencing new questions makes us wrestle with where we are. Exploring the resources of our tradition enables us to gain some confidence (though not a false confidence) that God is able to speak to us, even now, in our own age, and in the terms of who we are now, rather than how we might have been in some nostalgic time in the past. Reflecting on our context means taking the society in which are placed seriously, and not pretending that, if we all just tried that little bit harder at the things we are doing already, everything would suddenly change overnight – and even more rapidly if we only managed to agree about absolutely everything as well. Now comes the fourth stage – reconstruction and action, with some planning, focus, risk, and specific commitment to an enterprise whose outcome we cannot predetermine. It is all quite scary again, but once more, ‘twas ever thus. Faith is not the same as knowledge, and we must expect things to be uncertain if we are to be serious followers of the wandering rabbi of Galilee.
Is there a figure who can help us here? Many could be chosen, but one in particular stands out: a German Lutheran pastor who was hanged at Flossenburg in the closing weeks of the Second World War for his part in the resistance to the Nazi dictator, and his complicity in the attempted plot to assassinate him in June the previous year. His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and he was only 38 years old. Born in what was then German Silesia, in Breslau (now Wroslaw, Poland), his family moved to Berlin, where his father was a professor of Psychiatry. Although some of his forebears were pastors, the tall, young, bright, sensitive Dietrich was brought up in a non-churchgoing environment disrespectful of the Berlin Cnurches, religion being confined to hymn-singing around the piano at festivals. But God broke through this cosy, fashionably anti-church shell, and a theological student he became at Tübingen. It was in his student years that he knew of Hitler’s unsuccessful ‘putsch’ in Munich, which led to a lenient sentence, the prisoner using his time of captivity to write ‘Mein Kampf’, in which was contained a philosophy that was to lead his country to catastrophe and collapse within twenty years.
Dietrich then moved to Berlin and completed a doctorate in 1927 on the nature of the Church, in which he tried to combine two distinct influences. One was the radical theology of Karl Barth, at Göttingen, who set out to recall the Churches to their proper task, which was to preach a gospel of grace and forgiveness – instead of taking what he regarded as the soft, optimistic approach that had let down so many of the men in the trenches. The other was the social theology of Ernst Troeltsch, a professor at Berlin who had died in 1923. For Bonhoeffer, you cannot have one without the other: the Church must challenge both the world and itself; and it must be marked by a vigorous corporate life rather than the ‘come along when it suits you’ approach that was common among many German Protestants at the time. His senior colleagues did not take kindly to all this, and he was packed off abroad, to New York in order to study, as well as to serve curacies in German Lutheran congregations in Barcelona and London. This conveniently got him out of the way of the opening years of the Nazi regime, which he opposed from the start. But he returned to Germany and set up his own theological college in Finkenwalde, Pomerania, for pastors who did not want to join the official Church, which he saw as compromised.
The key to Bonhoeffer’s thinking is best expressed in a book which he published in 1937, based on the experiences of the common life of the Finkenwalde Seminary; its English translation is ‘The Cost of Discipleship’, and it consists of a compressed meditation on the Sermon on the Mount, which was a favourite topic for his preaching. It is clear if we put this book side by side with life at Finkenwalde that he had learned a great deal from his travels, particularly from his experience of theological college life in England. For most Lutheran (and Reformed) pastors, going to a University in order to get a degree in theology was the sum-total of their training, and although the course could include some practical theology, there was not much of what we regard as familiar for our ordinands, such as placements, parish visits, and trial sermons. Bonhoeffer is reconstructing Christian life, and he is doing so in a way that reflects a close-knit, collegiate community existence, but in a style that is authentically Lutheran. The whole community meets for daily prayer twice a day, consisting of bible-readings, prayer, and vigorous Lutheran song; and there is a weekly eucharist, with opportunity for preparation, and mutual confession, beforehand. ‘What matters in the Church is not religion but the form of Christ, and its taking form amidst a band of men’ – that is vintage Bonhoeffer. For him, ‘the call of Jesus binds the disciples into a brotherhood.’
But what we have to do and say is not always obvious. That is why, for example, when it comes dealing with the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, Bonhoeffer remarks that ‘prayer is the supreme instance of the hiddenness of the Christian life.’ Time and again, we are brought back to the heart of the gospel through the mind of a man who could see catastrophe coming, and lamented how the Church in many ways colluded with this national downfall. To read Bonhoeffer is to experience a warm chill. He is full of the love of God, but all too aware of its sobering effect on wayward people who are determined that all is really well when it isn’t, and who then suddenly realize that they need to think more deeply about why they are trying to follow Jesus at all.
Bonhoeffer warns us against being compromised. Every time I stand up to speak in the House of Lords (a body he might conceivably admire, though I can’t be sure, and he might not approve of bishops being there!), I ask myself to what extent am I being faithful to the demands of the responsibility with which I have been entrusted. The fear of compromise, of course, can lead the Church into the opposite direction, of becoming a self-satisfied group of people who spend all their time complaining about the world, and doing little to change it. Bonhoeffer would have none of that false alternative. In order to reconstruct the way we do our Christianity, to make plans for our future mission, we need to ensure that we speak with a prophetic voice when we have to; and if that means making a nuisance of ourselves, then well and good.
There is, however, another challenge which Bonhoeffer gives us, and it concerns how to construct and to be new forms of Christian community. The tightly-knit seminary in Pomerania which the Nazi authorities eventually closed was one answer; it is not the only one. It could well be that we are being called in our age to become different kinds of Christian community. This is nothing new: I have been part of very different kinds of Church life across the years, from the Lincolnshire market-towns with their historic atmosphere, through fragmented urban life in Manchester, followed by hyperactive commuterland Guildford; and now, my somewhat rootless existence as a nomad prelate, one moment with my household, then my colleagues, then my Cathedral, and most Sundays sharing strikingly different patterns not just of worship, but of discipleship, all over South-East Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. There could be some dead wood, things that we need to let go of, like a part of the parish programme that has long passed its sell-by date, or a church-building that has become an impossible burden on its congregation, and for which there are no adjacent uses for the community. There are many green shoots as well, like the Day-Nursery Centre in Segensworth. For Bonhoeffer, issues were perhaps more clear-cut in Nazi Germany than they are for us now. But he speaks to us, nonetheless, from the ashes of destruction that overtook his great nation and church – from which signs of new life immediately sprang up. There is an in-built resurrection dynamic here. It may well relate to a need for us to be more ambitious than we often are at present about raising the level of our ‘church-talk’, so that it is about what really matters: God exists, regardless of how many people happen to believe in him, and our conversations, our day-to-day efforts at evangelism, could be more elevated than they are, in order to reflect that essential truth.
We could do a lot worse than wait upon the Lord this Lent, and ask for eyes to see, and ears to hear, where and how we are being led into the future – God’s future, his purposes for us, in his ‘Kairos’ moment, of eternity in our midst.
Quotations: from Bonhoeffer
‘What matters in the Church is not religion but the form of Christ, and its taking form amidst a band of men (and women)’.
‘Prayer is the supreme instance of the hiddenness of the Christian Life.’
Questions:
What form should the Church of the future take if it is to be really faithful?
Have I the patience to probe beyond outward facades in order to discover what kind of Christian life I am being called to along with others?
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
