1957
In 1957, the last term of my final year at Wimbledon Park County Primary School, aged 11 years and 10 months, I fell for a beautiful blue-eyed, blond, lithe boy who arrived in my class, his family having moved to Wimbledon. I knew from my desire for him that this was my identity and destiny, to be attracted to and love intimacy with other boys in the same way that most of the others in my class desired or were going to desire being with the opposite sex. I knew that this desire was taboo; it could not be revealed to my parents, nor to the boy himself. I knew also that it was a desire sinful in the eyes of God (God being imagined anthropomorphically thanks to the images in stained glass and children’s Bibles). I also knew with an arrogant conviction that if this is what God thought of me, then God was wrong and I was right. I knew I was right to trust my feelings and my physical desires for intimacy and love. I trusted my intuition, my awareness of who I am. Five months later, aged 12, I was confirmed.
1963
Six years later in 1963 John Robinson’s Honest to God was published. I was eighteen. My confident, arrogant self had already worked out that I didn’t believe in the anthropomorphic God of the Bible and Church. Honest to God confirmed my intuition. I was relieved that a Church of England bishop shared my disbelief in this unbelievable God and the stories that introduced and concluded the life of Jesus, the miracle working, walking-on-water Son of God. I could be a Christian without having to believe in the literal reality of everything in the Bible or the Church’s traditional creedal formularies. The Bible accounts of people and events were unbelievable, even if some were clearly grounded in real people. The narratives wove deep, powerful truths and my soul was stirred by the myths. My soul also knew the difference between the spiritual truths contained in myth and the unbelievable ways the vicar taught about them Sunday by Sunday.
1979
For three decades I felt at home in the Church of England. I was accepted for ordination and served in parish ministry and hospital chaplaincy for twenty years. But for the last two decades, during which I worked as an activist and campaigner for change, I became more and more disenchanted with the regressive addiction to the fantasy, unreal, impossible-to-believe-in, unhealthy God now mainstreaming in the Church.
2022
Nearly sixty years on from Honest to God, a book has been written by two Christians who are also disenchanted with contemporary theology. They have rekindled my arrogant trust in my intuition and feelings, a trust that has been steadily eroded by the decadence of today’s Church of England. This decadence is exemplified for me in the two major projects absorbing so much time and energy in the Church: Simpler, Humbler Bolder and Living in Love and Faith. Both manifest the tragic regressive state of the Church, both are being largely ignored in my locality, both enshrine inadequate theologies and both have been written largely in ignorance of the experience and reality of the divine that was so strikingly obvious to me as a teenager.
1967
John Robinson published another slim book in 1967 – But that I can’t believe! It is mostly a collection of previously published newspaper and journal articles with six new brief chapters. In the final chapter, Robinson writes:
“In the past, the missionary proclamation of the Christian Church presupposed that the word ‘God’ and the reality for which it stands was something at the centre of our lives that we had to convey to the heathen on the remoter borders of civilisation. But today it is not the heathen who are remote but the word ‘God’ itself. Today the effect for millions of the images of God ‘up there’ or ‘out there’ is to locate God in an area of experience in which they no longer live with any vital part of their being. The way in, I am persuaded, is from what I have called ‘the other end’ – that is, not from the words, the doctrines, the definitions, which seem so distant, but from whatever is most real for people.”
“People simply do not understand ‘given’ truths, and if we merely confront them with these in doctrine or in morals and say ‘Take it or leave it’, then in most cases they will leave it. A profoundly biblical approach to truth is to insist that the way through is from experience to authority, from relationships to revelation, from immanence to transcendence, rather than the other way round.”
My later training as a psychotherapist taught me the truth of this approach. The way to the knowledge of God, the approach of the Prophets, said Robinson, was through obedience, sensitivity, justice, in the events and relationships of everyday life. The only thing that is authoritative in modern culture is what authenticates itself as real, valid, true, meaningful, he says, and this is not far from what Jesus was trying to communicate. Robinson lists six things that matter most when we are seeking what is real: a very real sense of integrity; a sense of justice; a real sense of solidarity; an inescapable sense of responsibility; concern that people matter for their own sake; and sensitivity to quality of relationship. “The criterion for what makes for deep, stable, mature, free personal relationships is the more significant test, gay or straight, married or single.”
Robinson’s six things that matter most still matter to me. His perception of cultural reality that was true in 1967 remains true for me today. I have never believed what conservative ‘traditional orthodoxy’ says must be believed to be a Christian. The gulf between what most people believe today and what the Church presents as essentials of contemporary belief is huge compared with the 1960s, but the gulf is barely talked about.
The Church of England today is involved in very expensive, futile, regressive processes aimed at breaking the deadlocked disagreements about gender and sexuality. The Church wants “good disagreement.” That isn’t possible. The Church wants to resource and plant thousands of new Christian cells and communities while withdrawing support for parish ministry. How did our Archbishops and bishops convince themselves that offering people today an understanding of God that was being rejected in the 1960s is going to appeal to people in the 2020s? How did this mentality develop?
Crisis in the USA
Take a look at the USA. It is in a state of paralysis, unable to achieve any legislative change to deal with gun violence, discrimination against people of colour, abortion rights, the abusive Republican party, let alone President Trump and the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol. The two hundred year old American constitution grants every state the right to elect two senators despite large differences in population size. This gives a huge advantage to the geographically large Republican states with small populations. Effective political change has become almost impossible, endangering democracy and undermining the USA’s sense of itself as a country of radical freedom. For the best of reasons two hundred years ago the Constitution drafted rules that today give controlling power to an abusive minority.
Crisis in the Church of England
Today, conservative ‘traditional evangelical adherents of the so-called ‘plain truth of the Bible’ and Anglo-Catholics addicted to rituals reliant on masculine power are having a similarly disproportionate, toxic effect on the culture of the Church of England.
A minority of people who maintain the inerrancy of the Bible as the true and indisputable Word of God, never to be challenged or changed, have power in the Church of England to control the culture, vision and future of the Church. This conservative minority is opposed to the recognition of developments in human science and evolution over the past three or more centuries. They are opposed to the radical transformation of awareness in society as a whole that resulted in a re-working of Christian theological basics over the course of the twentieth century. In the second half of the century, there was a growth in understanding what helps us to become more healthy, integrated, grounded human beings, less infected by abusive ideas and practices fuelled by archaic theologies and concepts of God. But in the Church the imbalance of power, with conservative evangelicals in the ascendant and bishops lacking prophetic vision and authority, has enabled an archaic theology to become further embedded. People are afraid to confront this, fearing the judgement of those who know they are right. And people continued to abandon the Church, rejecting the so-called traditional Christian world view.
Christian theology, teaching and practice are no longer evolving today in creative response to what we are learning about the origins and evolution of the universe and the contamination of the planet by the human species. From my spiritual perspective we are not learning how to become more healthy, more at home with ourselves, more grounded and centred.
Unknowing God: Toward a Post-Abusive Theology
I referred earlier to a recently published book that has helped me understand why I feel so disenchanted with the Church of England and so alienated from contemporary life in the Church. The book is Unknowing God: Toward a Post-Abusive Theology by Nicholas Peter Harvey and Linda Woodhead. The book is born out of their “experience of how bad ideas about God can destroy creative faith.” Faith, in their understanding, “has nothing to do with passive reception of a set of propositions and rules: it is trust in awareness.”
We are living in an era when people lack the courage to question their understanding of the divine. We are becoming trapped by failures of the theological imagination, tied up in definitions and orthodoxies. To maintain ‘orthodoxy’ requires us to censor our experience. Linda describes her intimations of a different kind of God that opened her to new experiences of the divine – she felt herself connected to a powerful force that blended with her but was separate and greater than her. The line between the human and the divine, the natural and the spiritual, no longer seemed so sharp. Her experience resonates strongly with mine. She writes:
“As we grew older we looked for a bigger, more truthful, reality – whether secular or religious. If “God” becomes a dead letter, or a deadening one, we are better off without God. Loosening up my neurotic monotheism, I found the divine in new ways – without necessarily being able to give a coherent account. It does not all have to add up.”
Nicholas says “we know too much about other religious and philosophical claims to hold to the uniqueness of Jesus in that all-inclusive or all-surpassing sense.” Linda, that “there is no pure and innocent core to any religion, and no teaching or theology that issues infallibly in just and loving acts.” God/s “create us and we create them. Because we exist in symbiosis with our God/s, we must take responsibility for them, as well as for the institutional arrangements of the religions of which they are part.”
Truth for a 76 year old
My 11 year old and 18 year old self, however arrogant I may have been, knew truths about me and about the God of the Church. I have lived by my intuition and experience. I have been haunted continually by guilt and anxiety – that’s natural to neurotic western culture – but it has become increasingly hard to endure the guilt-inducing, neurotic, anxiety ridden culture of today’s Church. Our SELVES, our souls and bodies and body systems, our essence, our ability to process and trust our experience, all are compromised by the culture of today’s Church. A fatal flaw of contemporary orthodoxy and practice is that it teaches us not to trust human experience and emotions. It externalises experience, projecting it onto an idealised, fantasy Jesus and an all-powerful and almighty God-figure that doesn’t ‘exist’. The Church has a very inadequate theology of the Spirit, that mystical, creative, subtle, elusive dimension of life, universal to humankind, where encounters with the divine happen within us, every day, all the time, but are programmed by the Church out of our consciousness.
I have had to learn again to trust the arrogant wisdom of my youthful self. I am still learning to trust and listen to my contemporary self, my body and feelings, and the energy within.
Unknowing God: Toward a Post-Abusive Theology by Nicholas Peter Harvey and Linda Woodhead can be ordered from Church House bookshop.