In my copy of the New Testament I underline passages which take my fancy. Nearly all of them are about the deceitfulness of the cares of this world and of riches, about how concupiscence and vanity separate us from God, about glorying in tribulation which brings patience, experience and hope, about the flesh lusting against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, these being contrary to one another so that we cannot do the things that we would do, and so on. It is difficult to think of any sentiments which would be more intrinsically unsympathetic in most clerical circles. They are, I should say, about the most unpopular sentences it is possible to utter today; at religious gatherings they cause malaise and irritation; on radio and television panels derision and incredulity. When I use them I am often accused of insincerity or affectation, so rooted are the opposite assumptions - that by caring about the world we shall make it better, that we must aim collectively to get richer in order to get happier and happier, that the unrestrained satisfaction of our earthly hopes and desires is the way to physical, mental and spiritual contentment.
In the face of the otherworldliness which I still unfashionably find in the Gospels, as far as I am concerned the whole edifice of twentieth-century materialism - and the utopian hopes that go therewith - falls flat on it face. One is delivered from the myth of progress. The terrible vision of a Scandinavian-American paradise, with longer lives, more and better aphrodisiacs and more leisure and amenities for all, dissolves into nightmare, awaking from which one advances gingerly upon the sublime truth that to live it is necessary to die, that a life can only be kept by being lost - propositions which strike contemporary minds as pessimistic, but which seem to me optimistic to the point of insanity, implying as they do, that it is possible for mere man, with his brief life and stunted vision, to aspire after a universal understanding and a universal love. Is this being a Christian?
Showing posts with label institutional Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label institutional Christianity. Show all posts
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Am I A Christian?
Books like Resurrection or The Brothers Karamazov give me an almost overpowering sense of how uniquely marvellous a Christian way of looking at life is, and a passionate desire to share it. Likewise, listening to Bach, reading Pascal, looking at Chartres Cathedral or any of the masterpieces of Christian art and thought. As for the Gospels and Epistles, I find them(especially St John) irresistibly wonderful as they reduce the jostling egos of now - my own among them - to the feeble crackling flicker of burning sticks against a majestic noonday sun. Is it not extraordinary to the point of being a miracle, that so loose and ill-constructed a narrative in an antique translation of a dubious text should after so many centuries still have power to quell and dominate a restless, opinionated, over-exercised and under-nourished twentieth-century mind?
Learned theologians bend their powerful minds to demonstrate that God is dead and his church, therefore, become a useless excrescence.
One may marvel that, when pretty well every item of Christian belief and of Christian ethics has been thus subjected to some degree of denigration and attack by those ostensibly responsible for upholding and propagating them, congregations of sorts nonetheless continue to assemble in parish churches on Sunday mornings, and ordinands and novices, though in dwindling numbers, continue to come forward with seemingly authentic vocations. The church of Jesus Christ has to stagger on under the guidance of those who increasingly sympathize with, when they do not actually countenance, every attack on its doctrines, integrity and traditional practice. By one of our time's larger ironies, ecumenicalism is triumphant just when there is nothing to be ecumenical about; the various religious bodies are likely to find it easy to join together only because, believing little, they correspondingly differ about little.
Institutional Christianity, it seems to me, is now in total disarray, and visibly decomposing, to the point that, short of a miracle, it can never be put together again with any semblance of order or credibility. In their present state of decomposition the various Christian denominations are not even an impediment to Christian belief but just a joke.
The surrender of institutional Christianity to the promoters of a kingdom of heaven on earth has been so abject, the assumptions of scientific materialism are so widely accepted and arrogantly stated, that an aspiring Christian today is left in a kind of catacomb of his own making, utterly remote from the debates and discussions going on around him, whether about "permissive morality" or about the basic dogma of the Christian faith.
Learned theologians bend their powerful minds to demonstrate that God is dead and his church, therefore, become a useless excrescence.
One may marvel that, when pretty well every item of Christian belief and of Christian ethics has been thus subjected to some degree of denigration and attack by those ostensibly responsible for upholding and propagating them, congregations of sorts nonetheless continue to assemble in parish churches on Sunday mornings, and ordinands and novices, though in dwindling numbers, continue to come forward with seemingly authentic vocations. The church of Jesus Christ has to stagger on under the guidance of those who increasingly sympathize with, when they do not actually countenance, every attack on its doctrines, integrity and traditional practice. By one of our time's larger ironies, ecumenicalism is triumphant just when there is nothing to be ecumenical about; the various religious bodies are likely to find it easy to join together only because, believing little, they correspondingly differ about little.
Institutional Christianity, it seems to me, is now in total disarray, and visibly decomposing, to the point that, short of a miracle, it can never be put together again with any semblance of order or credibility. In their present state of decomposition the various Christian denominations are not even an impediment to Christian belief but just a joke.
The surrender of institutional Christianity to the promoters of a kingdom of heaven on earth has been so abject, the assumptions of scientific materialism are so widely accepted and arrogantly stated, that an aspiring Christian today is left in a kind of catacomb of his own making, utterly remote from the debates and discussions going on around him, whether about "permissive morality" or about the basic dogma of the Christian faith.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)