Inside the Bubble

Before heading off on Monday to the Bishop’s study morning at the Cathedral – or rather in a large marquee next to it as the Cathedral itself is being refurbished – I’d heard some statistics on the radio about global infant mortality, which is in 2015 little more than a third what it was in 1970. Deaths among Chinese children in their first year is down 90% over that time; even in sub-Saharan Africa the decline is in the order of 60%. I’ve been trying and failing to find statistics about global decline in rates of death from violence this century, which were discussed a few days ago in some programme or other: I remember the interviewee saying that though there’d been a blip up in the last three years due to the civil war in Syria, the long-term trend was very clear both in terms of war and other forms of homicide. Then there’s the generational decline in crime in (as far as I remember) every developed economy, no matter what sort of judicial policies they have adopted, the best explanation for which analysts have come up with is the cutting of the lead content of petrol and thus the brain-affecting poisons we breathe in. There seems little doubt that, Islamic State notwithstanding, we live in a world in which human beings are, by and large, better off, healthier, and less inclined to kill each other. It is also a world in which religious observance is in decline, most prominently in the developed West but not only there. Of course it may not carry on this way; we may be heading towards a collapse like that of Rome. But it’s what seems to be the case now.

The Bishop wanted to gather us all together to report on and discuss the results of a diocesan survey I could vaguely remember doing although my actual answers have long since fled my memory. I seem to spend half my life ‘breaking into small groups’ at the moment, and that's what we did. There were two striking moments in our group. One of my colleagues demanded (more than once) that the bishops provide a ‘cultural counter-narrative’ to the prevailing fear of talking about the Christian Gospel ‘because even if it’s not true people feel they will get cut down if they talk about Jesus, and they think the bishops have capitulated in terms of the Bible, truth, and morality’. Another, who combines a parish and diocesan role, complained that ‘the diocese expects me to do a vicar’s job with half the time and money’ and that when he desperately asked his colleagues in the local Deanery for some help ‘I got less than zero response, including from some of the biggest churches in the diocese’. I thought, Good for you for saying it. The marquee shrieked, howled and rattled around us, beaten about by high winds. 

I’ve said before that my problem with the very sincere attempt to plan for the future our diocese and its offices are involved with is that it has the faint feeling of ‘one-more-heavism’, that only if we do what we do a bit harder and a bit sharper we can save the whole thing, or at least a lot of it. The top seven answers to the survey question ‘What most hinders growth in your parish?’ were apparently all internal churchy factors, that we don’t do A or aren’t very good at B or have to spend too much time on X: I was astonished that nobody seemed to have responded that the biggest thing that hinders growth is vast cultural change that we can do very, very little about, that makes people work all hours Jupiter sends and produces families so scattered that even our most devout folk spend half their weekends away visiting them. Focusing only on internal matters while not remembering what’s going outside our church walls is a recipe for angst, guilt, and disappointment.

What nobody wanted to talk about was the massive question of what we think we’re doing it all for. Those statistics I mentioned at the start of this piece point to a world which, in all sorts of ways, is improving (at least for human beings), materially and morally, and largely doing it without any great contribution from Christians qua Christians. The traditional Christian narrative is to maintain that human beings are deeply wicked, that they both deserve punishment from God and can’t manage without his help, and his demand is that we seek forgiveness or get pitchforked into Hell. Now, once you have converted you begin to appreciate your own flawed nature and God’s holiness with, if anything, greater clarity as you go forward, so even this caricature of the Gospel carries some truth with it; but to someone who isn’t already on that trajectory, its account is at total odds with what they see and experience. This is the problem with what the first of my colleagues I quoted above suggested about the role of the bishops: we Christians (I don’t think it’s a problem that only afflicts the Church of England), in many ways, do not agree what the Gospel is. I suspect my understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is significantly at odds with that gentleman’s, coincide though it may do in most respects; I think the way in which we describe the Gospel to a sceptical world has to take account of that world. Once we get beyond platitudes those differences will emerge.

Faced with a world that looks, to all appearance and evidence, as if it can get on perfectly well without us and without God, what can we do? We can claim that appearance and evidence doesn’t matter, that God isn’t interested in that stuff, and that people face eternal damnation unless they follow certain steps.* Not all of us, however, can say that as we do not see in Jesus Christ a God who is indifferent towards real suffering (or the reduction of it) and instead arbitrarily demands obeisance as the price of survival. It isn’t that I think you can buy your way into Heaven by being good; it’s that a God who is disconnected from suffering isn’t the God Jesus reveals. Such a God works to make things better, to make people suffer less. If he was not interested in our hurting, there would be no grounds on which to demand repentance of us: God would become incoherent and irrational, and he is not, he is the definition of reason. If the world is getting 'better', in so far as you can measure such things, how does that relate to God? 

Could it be that the material and moral betterment of the human world is intended to teach the Church something? It cannot, it simply cannot be, that fewer children dying and fewer people killing each other is not a movement of God in the world. And if it is, Christians cannot, in the end, avoid reframing the story we tell ourselves and seek to tell others in terms of that great fact; though we may be too blinded by it, still, to be able to make that shift without more pain.

I know that my life is better with Jesus Christ than it would have been, and was, without him; that I am more fully human, more capable of love. And if that’s true of me, then probably it will be of others. Is that enough of a story? Enough of a promise?
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*PS. I’d forgotten that the Church of England has grappled with this before, the fruit of the deliberations then emerging in Article 13 of the sixteenth-century set of 39:

Works done before the grace of Christ and the Inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace … We doubt not but that they have the nature of sin.

This is an effort to combat the thought that people can work their way into heaven by being good: it's an attempt to preserve the idea of the undeserved grace of God. I have in the past glossed this Article to mean that normal human goodness cannot root out from the human character the causes of sin and the results of the Fall; but, on its own, attempting to argue that patent goods (fewer babies dying) are not good at all is desperate reasoning, and nowhere to be found in Scripture. Rather, Isaiah 5.20 warns ‘woe to those who call evil good, and good evil’. It's not only desperate, but spiritually dangerous.