Freeing the Faith
Hugh Dawes, SPCK, 1992

Life is the basis of truth
As the author remarks in his introduction, this book is more to do with the pastoral concerns of a congregation, than with plumbing the murky depths of theology. But that doesn't mean, thank goodness, that the result is slight or not deserving of attention. 

Far from it: Dawes has successfully presented an outline of radical Christian thought which is highly relevant to anyone who will face the extreme tensions raised in any thinking person by tradition. 

His two starting points - both of which have been shaking the foundations now for centuries - are clear:

• All who wish to live by truth in the 21st century have to seriously consider the possibility that reality as we perceive it has no room for the supernatural;

• And, following on from that, the starting point of our lives is not truth as revealed by God - be it via Bible or bishop - but "… the present day and its realities, as best we can see and understand them", as Dawes puts it.

Lest this slip past as something which doesn't shake the foundations, it should be firmly noted that traditional Christianity - which a "liberal" Christian might term "conservative", as does Dawes - has fought a rearguard battle on just these two points for at least 300 years now.

In the Middle Ages and Medieval times the defence of the faith by ridding the earth of heresy was perhaps understandable, though by what Christian teaching or vision of Jesus the burning and torturing of heretics could ever have been justified beats me.

Nevertheless, in previous centuries the concept of revelation from God, and therefore of incontrovertible revealed truth, was at least a consistent approach in terms of the world view of the times.

But the foundations of tradition trembled with Galileo Galilei, rocked and twisted under the weight of Newton and finally crumbled under the impact of Darwin. At every point, traditional Christian leaders defended with all their might, twisting and turning as they sought to find a way out of what outsiders recognised as a blind alley.

Now nothing can resurrect traditional teachings - they have
disappeared forever beneath a new and lush growth of human
reason and discovery. 

This assertion is not merely frothy humanist optimism or sneaky conspiracy as some traditionalists would have it. Nobody who tries to remain faithful to the love of Jesus and at the same time to think deeply about reality would deny that human nature remains "morally frail" or that we continue to struggle with age-old troubles and temptations.

But the essential issue is this: the universe has been shown to be a
massive, highly complex system, the tiniest parts of which affect every other tiny part. Disturb even the smallest part of a system such as this and the entire system changes. 

So too is our present-day knowledge a complex, inter-related system. It is an integral whole, built upon scepticism and logic, probed and moderated by the scientific method and limited by the realisation that all truth is provisional. In brief, reality as we know it today has no room for the idea that absolute truth can somehow be derived from a hypothetical supernatural dimension. The very disciplines traditionalists themselves use to examine the origins of the Bible deny this concept.

The collapse of traditional Christianity impends. Perhaps it will softly and suddenly vanish away like Lewis Carroll's Baker in The Hunting of the Snark, perhaps it will last another century or two. But go it will in the long term. 

In its place, stresses Dawes, will be the 

… discovery of a continuity with earlier Christian experience at a level that goes genuinely deeper than that of doctrines and formularies. Accepting that we do not believe the same things as they did actually frees us to relate again, both to the world and to that which we name as God … Once we do that, faith is freed, and can begin to live again.

Bankrupt local churches
Like the pastor he is, Dawes starts with the failure of Christian orthodoxy at the level of the ordinary person in the ordinary community. He puts his finger on an immediate problem. While the ordinary person with a modern outlook on the world is firmly connected to what he or she can experience, orthodoxy regards the ultimate good as "… salvation from the world rather than in it".

Thus the role of the church in the local community is to take people out of their world into one which promises them safety from "… the foes said to be lurking outside, until death comes as the blessed release from all that threatens". 

As Dawes remarks: "In many ways it is strange that such a creed can have any followers at all" for the church by taking this course loses touch with real life and confines itself to a Sunday fantasy.

How does losing touch affect the local church's impact on the community? Dawes shows multiple ways in which the Christian community ring-fences itself against what it perceives as predatory invasion by wrong-thinking unbelievers:

• Traditionalists confound ordinary meaning by using a special code, comprehensible only to those who are "not of this world" so that the gospel can be understood only "… within the redeemed community and even there is not accessible to reason … it renders true conversation and dialogue quite impossible". The local church resembles a private club with its own Jesus-speak.

• Seemingly as a response to perplexed irritation displayed by outsiders, many traditionalists "… take flight into fantasies that monstrously distort what is actually happening" and talk of persecution and having to "suffer for the faith". It doesn't take much thought to realise that this is sheer bunkum, at least in the liberal social climate of Western Europe and the USA.

• The result of a defensive stance like this is inevitably exclusivism. In attempting to distinguish between the Church and the rest of the community, congregations tend to refuse infant baptism to those who will not jump through theological hoops. The same protectiveness extends to marriage - even in England, where there is a legal right to be married in an Anglican Church. Instead of affirming and serving the local community, such actions effectively alienate it.

• If there is a duty to prevent error getting into the church, there is often an equal responsibility to excise error within. Lest we think that this is no longer the case, we should note heresy hunts in conservative Protestantism, matched only by the ruthless penalising by the Roman Catholic curia of anyone deemed to have publicly expressed any view contrary to the official line. Dawes points out that "For today's neo-conservatives ... Christianity … is a total package, delivered once and for all and incapable of change, and you must either take or leave the whole".

Dawes wonders if the process he describes as the "failure of orthodoxy" is unstoppable. Liberal Christians, he thinks, have all but disappeared from the local church. At the very least, because traditionalists have for so long defended their turf, any process of
adjusting to a new expression of faith will be painful.

Fashioning a new God
Quite correctly the author focuses on the most difficult part of any  new Christian awakening - the nature of God. To claim (as did Karl Barth) that faith is above reason and therefore inaccessible to it is the final line of defence. 

The claim is, as it happens, an impregnable fortress. Its walls cannot be breached because they rest upon a self-validating argument (as Dennis Nineham points out). If reason cannot explore faith then the assertion that faith is above reason can't be argued.

It is a matter of personal choice to rest one's life upon assertions which can't be tested by human thought but (I assume) are affirmed purely emotionally - if there is such a phenomenon as pure and therefore blind emotion.

For those for whom reason is an integral part of them and who cannot take the road of unreason, two critical matters present themselves:

1. Until very recently we had little or no knowledge of the  probable origin of the universe. We can be fairly certain now, however, that the universe had a beginning and that nothing in the universe can have any reference point before the singularity from which the Big Bang emerged. 
   
   It follows that we can't refer to anything "outside" the expanding universe (though it should be noted that argument about this continues). In this sort of universe, if we are to experience God at all it must be in terms of his  creation. 
   
   It may be that there is a supernatural dimension from which God communicates with us. But if so, God can use only things of this universe to reveal himself - in which case we have no way of knowing what is revelation and what isn't. We are, as it were, restricted to what is natural in order to understand anything about God.

2. As if that restriction were not enough, Feuerbach and others have pointed out for over 100 years now that the nature of humanity is such that we cannot describe or conceptualise anything except in terms of ourselves, since it is impossible for us to comprehend anything truly "other" than ourselves.
   
   The bottom line of this truth is that religion and through it the way we understand God is something we invent - from experience of the universe, from our lives, from others, but nevertheless invent.

We are universe-bound and we are human. And so, as Dawes points out, we have now to "… let go of these ideas of revelation and hot-lines to eternal truth, and instead say straightforwardly that Christian faith is a wholly human work".

Even if most people don't study the Big Bang and quantum physics, 
they do recognise that a traditional Christian belief in a God "out there" who sits in heaven and pulls strings to make us dance, won't hold water. 

And if it doesn't ring true in their lives as it once did for our ancestors, then they walk away - politely, without rancour, but nevertheless they walk away. "That people have left behind belief in that sort of God is a fact not gainsaid by the existence of a few pious leftovers," writes Dawes.

Perhaps clinging a little anxiously to the old, old story, Dawes urges Christians to see that in Jesus heaven has finally and irreversibly come down to earth, and to begin "… unambiguously, to set about recasting the myth of the story of God". 

I would venture to take this further and suggest that such people will not truly progress unless they consciously recognise that they are actively choosing the nature of their God and therefore of their religion. 

Is the God of my life to be a God of money or a God of love? Choose! Yes, take notice of the God of the past - but choose. As Dawes says: "… experientially this God is as real as anything else in life, as the name we choose to give to those particular things we encounter as real".

Unattractive miserable sinners
Fundamental to the failure of traditional Christianity in the 21st century is its insistence upon drawing a soul-destroying portrait of humanity. Not only are we all miserable sinners, fatally infected by the genetic effluent of the Fall and warped and twisted by our evil natures, but only if we recognise that we are utterly depraved can we appreciate God's mercy and be saved from ourselves. 

This is no longer an attractive proposition, if it ever was.

The 20th century dealt the final death blow to the traditional concept of evil humanity in the development of sociology, anthropology and psychology.

Anthropology has taught us that no one culture can be more right or even necessarily better than another. Unlike our Victorian forebears we no longer automatically look down with contempt at cultures simpler than ours. Indeed, as Dawes remarks, a younger generation actively resists such ideas and behaviours.

Sociology's research, albeit still in its infancy, subject to large errors and sometimes unable to follow the eddies of fast social change, has given us an appreciation of the potential effects on people of poor social conditions. We can no longer invoke inherent evil to explain negative social behaviours.

Psychology has made huge advances in understanding why individuals behave as they do. We now know that a warped upbringing - perhaps combined with social disability - can produce behaviours which would once have been termed demonic. When we know something about how sexuality is genetically and socially determined, it becomes much harder to condemn gay sex out of hand just because the Bible does so.

Dawes puts it in a nutshell: 

So recasting the Christian view of human life means starting here with the way things genuinely are, and treating this with the utmost seriousness. 

As he points out, most Christian worship lays heavy stress on confessing sin 

 … and Anglican clergy with their daily prayers can find themselves doing this three times a day. What possible reason could normal men and women have for wanting anything to do with a community that views life in this way?

Yes, there's the rub!

While the Church persists in such an approach, buttressed by strange talk of sacrifice and burnt offerings, by real presence and miracles, those outside its hallowed walls come to God by recognising Jesus not as 

… someone who leaps into play from outside the arena … but someone who from within shows what a human life might be.

It's true that, in Dawes words, humanity is morally fragile. We stumble and fall, we mess things up through a combination of negligence, weakness and our own fault. But we are also capable of great goodness and, as Dawes witnesses about his own congregation, we do many good things as well. 

To acknowledge that is to open the door 

… to regard what has traditionally been called the divinity of Jesus as being quite simply the working out in his life … of that spirit of God (God as meaning and purpose) which is there potentially … in every human life.

But if potentially there, are we to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah, as
rising above all others? Dawes thinks not, and in doing so is in tune with much current thinking about the Christian faith. 

It has become increasingly difficult to discount the heavy contribution of the gospel writers to the traditional vision of Jesus. As Son of God, it's only by rendering language meaningless that we can talk of him as human. But if we no longer appeal to an historical incarnation, what then?

The response to this question brings the challenge of what Dawes calls an "open faith" to a head. "A type for humanity is as far as we can honestly go", he writes. " It is only the Christ of dogma that requires to be protected from the realities of belonging to a particular place and time."

The dead, incredible Jesus of tradition springs to life wonderfully the moment he becomes human, as soon as our claims for him are cast in more modest terms.

Resurrection here and now
Like Dawes, I and perhaps others have wondered why it is that
traditionalists make such a brouhaha about resurrection, claiming that without it the Christian faith collapses. There is no logical connection between the resurrection of Jesus and mine, particularly if it is claimed that God achieved the former event as a one-off miracle.

If we consider what Paul says about the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15) it isn't clear what he means by the term. Dawes maintains that if resurrection is "unpacked" to ordinary people as (a) a miraculous historical event and (b) a prelude to the resurrection of all at the last day they "… back off in incredulity and disbelief".

This reaction isn't surprising. Nowadays being "dead" has a meaning entirely different from that understood by Paul and everyone else until modern times. Before then, death was (at least to the vast majority) the "departure" from the body of some life force. Now we know that "dead" means the irreversible termination of cellular activity in the human body. 

So to give credit to anyone's resurrection - especially a bodily resurrection - within time/space is to make a claim which denies the validity of the entire interlocking system of human truth as we know it today.

Dawes recommends that we step away from the traditional idea (as Paul himself may have done, for all we know) and "… radically restate the resurrection faith" as an experience available naturally to all, which places hope "… not on an extraordinary event, but on an experience that offers a remarkable window … on to ordinary life, the life that as human beings we all of us share".

To put it bluntly (Dawes is not blunt but charmingly tentative): All this business about life after death on the basis on an historical resurrection event is supported by the flimsiest of historical evidence and by no other type of knowledge known to us. We do not and cannot know if we as individuals will somehow survive death. 

And to make that promise is at best silly, and at worst a confidence trick.

As Dawes insists, we need not be tentative or ashamed of putting our faith in new life as a here-and-now reality which can be claimed by anyone. It is

• intellectually much more sustainable and credible than tradition. To put it in the words of David Jenkins quoted by Dawes: The Easter faith is about "… the cumulative, personal and faith-filled discovery by the first Christian women and men that Jesus, his life, his continuity, his hopes and his challenges had not been cancelled by his crucifixion".

• And it is therefore well-rooted "… in Christian origins and
  closer, in its spirit, to the convictions of the first generation of
  believers than much of the superstition which passes for
  resurrection faith among the 'orthodox'".

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Are we to be fantastic in our claims or convincing? If Dawes is correct - and the now-rapid decline of traditional religion indicates that he may be - then it is hugely more interesting and convincing to claim that we in the Christian fellowship can access joyful, productive ongoing renewal here-and-now in our lives. 

To assert this is better than to ask others to "believe" (whatever that means) in a miracle of some 2 000 years ago, flimsily attested to historically, contrary to everything else we know about the universe, and achieved by the agency of a divine being from a supernatural dimension about which we know nothing.

The significance of resurrection, therefore, grows from incredible claims for the long-distant past to 

… a way of speaking about the significance of life here and now, life before death indeed, and we take eternal life to be the handing on of what we represent, what we have done and what matters to us, in lives we have touched, rather than any sort of personal immortality in eternity.

It's not difficult to predict that this approach will be rubbished by some traditional believers who so often appear desperate to hang on to doctrine in the face of reason and, if one is to risk being less than charitable, to maintain a spurious hold on those who are too fearful to grasp new life now and wish to defer it until very much later.

Valuing the world
Although Dawes doesn't expand much on this radical approach to life, he does deal with a few of its consequences.

Through resurrection in this life the world can be renewed. As he points out, Christianity is confounded by an ethical structure which, because it rests upon absolutes from a past era, fails miserably when applied to choices of the 21st century. 

It cannot help, says Dawes, but be pathetically narrow. He contrasts a pre-election circular from the World Development Movement asking him to attend a meeting on aid, national debts, arms sales and the global environment, with a Christian group which was to consider abortion, pornography, Sunday trading and church broadcasting allocations.

As he points out, the crux of the matter is that any doctrine which claims to be set in concrete is dead, for two reasons:

[1] It cannot adapt to the one constant we have been given - change. It remains fossilised while all around new challenges, new insights and new problems whirl in a complex dance which it is our task as humans to fathom and join in with. He writes:

Timeless moral absolutes do indeed have a certain superficial attractiveness in a world of change, but always at the expense of treating seriously and sincerely the genuine complexity of life.

[2] It fails to recognise that the past is not normative, that traditional claims for God-given absolutes are just that - claims. It is quite clear to a majority of thinking people that all moral and ethical rules derive from human attempts to "do that which is right" - in Christian terms, to do that which is loving. 

Not only do we "invent" God anew for every age, but we also work out the rules of life over and over again for each new situation.

To put it simply, nothing can ever be renewed without change. Change is impossible unless every demand for change is responded to not with knee-jerk responses according to inflexible rules, but with a genuine humility which knows no answers and which responds as though every situation is an opportunity rather than a threat.

If there are no absolutes, if Jesus is one of us, if life is for the taking, then what are the consequences for the Church at large and the ordinary Christian congregation in particular?

First, Christians can preach more about rejoicing in the ordinary, everyday things of their lives and say less about the fantastic. We can begin valuing what is ordinary. Dawes points out that traditional preaching survives at one level because it claims to proclaim the extraordinary, and goes on to exploit irrational subjects like demon possession, exorcism and the like.

But the cost is very frightening. For religion, when it operates in these ways, boldly discounts reason and takes positive pride in setting it aside. Supernaturalism is indeed obliged to do this, for the dismissal of the natural in its highest forms - human intellect, human skill, human understanding - is required in order for it to take root.

He makes a telling point, obvious to anyone who steps away from tradition. "The ordinary is actually so much more extraordinary than old-fashioned religion has ever been prepared to allow". 

To make the point in my own way, which of the two accounts below do you think is the more attractive?

• The charismatic leader of a group of unlettered peasants went to a shameful death by crucifixion at the hands of the Roman authorities rather than expose his followers to the same fate. 
  
  After his death, aided by a turncoat Jewish Pharisee of great persuasive power, his tiny band of followers realised that they could embody their leader's deep sense of life, joy and loving purpose. They began a religious movement which became the state religion of the Roman Empire within a mere four centuries. Their successors were so successful that 2 000 years later there are more followers of Jesus than ever before - more than 1 billion people world wide. 
  
  Their movement has been fantastically influential, helping create forms of society and modes of thought which have contributed to, if not made possible, the success of humanity on a scale never before known. Even today, they lead the way in the face of huge difficulties worldwide.

Or ...

• A group of unlettered peasants (aided by a Pharisee who had a spiritual vision while traveling to Damascus) having seen and shared meals with the risen spiritual body of their dead leader, embarked on a campaign to convert everyone to their beliefs. 
  
  Their leader had worked miracles, healed lepers, raised people from death and walked on water before being resurrected by God and then going up through the clouds to heaven. This leader is the Son of God, conceived by a young woman without the sexual act. 
  
  He still visits his followers in dreams, visions and subliminal spiritual experiences. Those who don't believe in this leader and worship him as members of his body, the Church, will after death go to a place of eternal torment. Those who believe in him in terms of the absolute truth of the Bible will go to their eternal bliss in a heavenly afterlife.

Second, instead of defining itself as against everyone who doesn't agree with it, the Christian Church can begin exploring different ways of relating to those who differ from it. Dawes pleads for an open Church.

Dawes, apparently with some justice, fears that as other Christians move towards an open church which will embrace any and all without caveat, so will conservative tradition harden in its stand that extra ecclesiam nulla salus. 

If that is the case, then open Christianity may be rigorously excluded from the institutional Church - even if they wish to be there. 

Already such exclusions effectively happen within traditionalist congregations. For many conservatives, credal statements and dogmatic tests seem to have become proportionately more important…

Is it really Christian?
An adventure into openness which begins the Christian experience in the world as we know it carries with it considerable risk, says Dawes.

Will the result be truly Christian, or will it merely become one of many essentially secular bodies trying to do good in the world? Of course, nobody can know the answer. 

But it remains true that Christianity has never been stable, a body of people with unchanging beliefs and practice. That is a falsehood which not even those who claim access to absolute truth can argue. Any attempt to stand still must result in the death of the Church. "Better, surely, to recognise that its survival actually requires the new", writes Dawes.

It may be that traditional Christianity is the opium of the people. But would an open Christianity touch any better the basic concern of the majority of humans - the constant struggle simply to survive?

Dawes answer is a touch unconvincing. At least, he says, an open Christianity rooted in reality, not focusing on heaven, will not pretend that life is not a struggle. It will, no doubt, freely acknowledge that 20% of the world's population use 80% of its annual resources, that the wealth of the 100 richest people in the world could eliminate all poverty. 

What such a faith does refuse to accept is that life is always bound to be this struggle, and it must therefore inevitably be deeply involved socially and politically.

Traditional Christianity has one advantage over Dawes' proposed open version: It can offer glory and peace after death and never be tested in this life. The earth-centred faithful are much more likely, as they struggle and rejoice, to ask "Is it worth it?"

It's hardly surprising that Dawes has no answer to this question
except to offer reassurance to those who suffer at the hands of a new religious fanaticism which Dawes perceives appearing among us.