UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Christianity in Oxford
By DAVID EDWARDS (Magdalen College, Oxford) THE most popular belief about Oxford is that its causes are lost ; this is held to apply to religion no less than to politics or rowing. And the memories crowding St. Mary's or Oriel or Tom Quad do suggest that the heyday of Christianity in Oxford coincided with mediaeval philosophy, the doomed humanism of the Oxford Reformers or the passage of Newman ex umbris et imaginibus to the Birmingham Oratory. Like Cranmer, Oxford's religion itself seems to have gone up in smoke long ago.
But the coloured porter who, we are told, affixed " Oxford Group " to the railway-compartment of some of Dr. Buchman's young friends gave Oxford religion a truer label. No doubt he reflected that the Methodist Church in its millions had begun in an undergraduate society in Christ Church ; he recalled how bold and profound had been the main tradition of Oxford theology, from Grosseteste to the living, and how Oxford had crowded to such feet as Paris to Abelard's ; he considered Oxford still capable of moral rearmament. He instantly guessed whence the young evangelists had derived their ideals. He had seen what Matthew Arnold obscured—that Oxford belongs, not to its ghosts, or even to its dons, but to its young. In such a society discussions about religion are as endemic as pimples.
Unfortunately, religioys discussions in Oxford are sometimes regarded as tenderly as pimples. In a sense this has always been so : self-questioning did not begin in 1851. But in that year the Anglican monopoly was broken, and seventy years ago all religious tests were abandoned. The result has been that openly committed Christians have been reduced to a self-conscious, organised minority in an " open " university. And the way in which that minority is organised among undergraduates is strange.
Every three years a mission attempts to strengthen and enlarge the minority. Indeed. William Temple's missions are supposed to have " stopped the rot " after the First World War ; and the Bishop of Bristol's mission talks last year were definitely designed to appeal to the bulk of the university—the enquirers. But it may be doubted whether many enquirers have actually attended these missions, and it was complained that, in these circum- stances, some missioners should have more clearly reflected the orthodoxy of their audiences. The main opportunity of encounter between the enquirers and organised Christianity at Oxford is through the chapels and societies, which conduct an unending mission. In most colleges that means Victorian Prayer-books on %civet cushions, a handful of communicants and, if we are lucky, candles and music on a Sunday night. Few of the Oxford college chapels can be described as strong forces in evangelism. The life has been drained out of them into the chapels and societies serving the university.
The two most vigorous of these societies have little truck with the university missions or the college chapels. Around the Roman Catholic chaplaincy is the Newman Society, the pro- minence of whose members in Oxford life is out of proportion to their numbers, large as these are. And non-Romans may well envy the Newman Society its inspiration through the Dominican and Jesuit houses, Blackfriars and Campion Hall. Of more restricted interests, but with an equal loyalty to clear principles and doctrines, is the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, the fundamentalist society. But neither of these societies seems to attract much traffic across the frontiers of Christian belief and modern thought. They make not a few individual conversions, but it seems improbable that the university as a whole will ever Pile upon the intellectual Ossa of Christianity the Pelion of Papal or Scriptural infallibility.
Elsewhere in the university there is at least variety. Incense or the intellect, Hymns A. & M., or the silence of the Friends— all these wants can be supplied every Sunday ; and denomina- tional societies continue the supply through the week. Perhaps the only undergraduates who are not satisfied with this fare are those not yet persuaded of the truth of Christianity itself, but unfortunately these do constitute the bulk of the university. Admittedly the Student Christian Movement, centering on St. Mary's, is supposed to provide an appeal to such people ; but it is weaker in Oxford than in most of its branches. The difficulty seems to arise from the migration of most of the evangelistically- minded to the narrower 0.I.C.C.U., which has a deep suspicion of the S.C.M. and of the intellectual probfrms with which that society specially deals. As a result the S.C.M. cannot persuade many enquirers to attend its meetings.
Yet there is still wide interest in religious questions. The Socratic Club and Aquinas Society continue to study the relations of religion and philosophy ; Christian dons like C. S. Lewis often draw considerable audiences ; and this academic year has seen the publication by Basil Blackwell of University. a terminal magazine containing open discussion by dons and undergraduates of religions and other fundamental questions. And University has not only been inaugurated ; it has also been sold.
Indeed there is a general sense that the Faculty of Theology. although dented, has not been decisively worsted in its long battle over the darkling plain with the apostles of scientific materialism. The H bomb and the Z call-up are not incentives to the grosser forms of evolutionary optimism. And in Oxford at least it is realised that only a limited number of human problems can be solved by a subscription to the New Statesman. The central challenge to Christian belief frogi intellectual quarters now seems to originate in the philosophy of logical analysis, a movement which has grown up round the silences of Professor Wittgenstein. The validity of theological language, which is questioned by most of Oxford's philosophers, is being considered—as it should be— on severely philosophical grounds, and a symposium of dons in University on the subject has even been promoted to the Third Programme ; but the best argument for theology would be if Christians themselves lived in a manner which could not be satisfactorily, explained except by talking about God. So once again the enquiry is being directed to the Churches. How do these Christians live ?
That seems now the central question, and it must be admitted that much Christian life in Oxford does not satisfy enquiry. Fundamentally, I suppose, it is a matter of common sin ; but superficially it is the price paid for Christianity's continued existence in Oxford. The religious societies have kept alive in a university whose official teaching has been almost entirely secularised. But they tend to introspection ; their machinery has so developed as to absorb not a few undergraduates who might otherwise make some impression on their agnostic friends in politics, the arts or even the examinations. So wide interest in religion seldom results in conversions to Church membership.
Must this machinery be scrapped before effective communica- tion can be established between the committed Christians and the bulk of the university? That would be the extreme view. But it is usually argued that the need is only for more pastors of devotion and calibre to run the existing machinery. And cer- tainly Christianity is not dead in Oxford. however frustrating the work of the college chaplains must now be. The chapels are there, waiting to be used, preserving at no little expense their heritage in song and stone ; the societies are ever burgeoning into fresh committees ; the intellectual debate continues ; and a new revival, in its interests more catholic than the O, ford Movement and more communal than the Oxford Groups. may be just round the corner.
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