South Bank Religion: Where is it Leading?

By T. E. UTLEY

?THERE have lately been some signs that both I sides in the South Bank controversy are beginning to feel that the time has come to ring the bell.

This is, indeed, the natural climax to any dispute in the Church of England, and this dispute, in all its phases, has been nothing if not Anglican in quality—Anglican in its ferocity, in the forensic over-simplification in which both parties have freely indulged, in the recurring hint from the orthodox that the time may have come to invoke the blunt instrument of authority, and in the often ill-concealed determination of both contestants that the row shall end in recon- ciliation.

What holds the Church of England together as a temporal institution is the unshakable con- viction of its members that a profound identity of belief underlies every patent contradiction of opinion. I remember recommending a Cambridge don, of quintessentially Anglican character, for the delicate task of writing for a great national newspaper the commemorative article on the occasion of the third centenary of the execution of Charles the Martyr. 'What will he say?' the editor asked. 'He will say,' I predicted, as it proved correctly, 'that Charles I and Cromwell were both fighting for the same thing.' How annoyed they would have been,' commented the editor, 'if they had realised it.'

To what extent can the same claim be made for the exponents of the South Bank religion and

their critics? a' So large a variety of phenomena are com- prised under this heading that it is very hard to attempt a general answer to the question. There is, for instance, no necessary connection between liberal theology, on the one hand, and jazz Masses or dramatic representations, in a con- temporary idiom, of traditional Bible stories. The pastoral effectiveness of these devices may be debated, but the debate does not involve any issue of principle. The Church has always sought to express its teaching and its worship intelli- gibly, and this, has necessarily involved, from time to time, changing the forms in which they are expressed. It is not in these fields that the real challenge of the modernists, if it ,is a real challenge, is being made.

This challenge may best be considered under three heads: there is the insistence on the need for changing the symbols in which religious truths are conveyed, the campaign against the withdrawn, sectarian exclusiveness which is alleged to distinguish Christians in their relations with the rest of society and, most contentious of all, the demand for a change in the form, and in some respects also in the content, of Chrii- tian moral teaching, particularly about sex.

In the first of these phenomena there is cer- tainly nothing new. It is one of the recurring features of liberal theology, which at times is preoccupied with explaining the miraculous ele- ments in Christian belief as symbolic devices legitimately used to give poetic expression to rationally understandable truths, and is at times concerned to attack traditional symbols as im- pediments to the apprehension of these truths. It cannot be doubted that the Christian religion has benefited infinitely from the exercise of both these activities, that, but for liberal theology, it would be virtually impossible for a rational man to be a professing Christian today. Among the

burdens which, the Christian faith imposes is the knowledge that at any moment the formula: in which it is expressed will contain at least some statements, apparently purporting to be of his- torical fact, which cannot by the ordinary pro- cesses of historical science be proved, and which, if past experience is any guide, are open to the hazard of refutation. What part of the Christian profession is permanent and inviolable, and what part may be subject to necessary revision is a question which can never with certainty be answered; if it could, there would, indeed, be no need to ask it, for the Church would un- doubtedly exclude from its creeds what could not be counted on as permanently valid truth. I do not believe that, if conclusive historical evi- dence incompatible with the view that Christ was born of a virgin could be adduced tomorrow, my faith in the essentials of the doctrine of the Incarnation would be gravely affected. It is a meagre and puerile kind of Christian apologetic which looks to history for the validating of theology, rather than to theology for the validat- ing of history, which tries to convince us that the evidence of the grave clothes is incontestable proof of the fact of the Resurrection, and that from this fact the whole duties of a Christian can be simply and authoritatively inferred. At times, the cause of orthodoxy has suffered grievously from this sort of advocacy, and the damage it has done has, I have no doubt, been more serious than any wrought by Dr. Barnes or the Bishop of Woolwich. The historical state- ments in the Creed are relegated to subordinate clauses and by this means we are instructed that they are to be believed by virtue of our belief in Christ, not that our belief in Christ is an inference to be drawn from history. If science requires us tp change either the status or the content of some traditional formulation of faith, we must surely obey it, for there is a sense in which a Christian's loyalty to truth must take precedence over his obedience to Christ.

All this the temperate orthodox will be dis- posed to admit. Yet, confronted with any such proposal of change, a Christian must ask whether science really obliges him to'accept it, or whether his scepticism may not derive less from respect for evidence than from a fundamental doubt about the truths of belief which can neither be sustained nor refuted by evidence in the scien- tific sense. Is it the idea of the virgin birth that is making the theology of the Incarnation un- acceptable, or is it our doubt about the theology of the Incarnation which is making it impossible for us to believe in the virgin birth? After all, the scientific truth that people are not usually born of virgins, far from being an impediment to the belief that Christ was so born, is the only thing which lends significance to the assertion that He was.

Strong as these doubts are, however, the fact remains that Christian mythology is from time to time altered, and that a proposal to alter it in the interests of pastoral efficiency is not in itself horrifying.

Similarly, the South Bank warning to Chris- tians against the danger of sectarian exclusiveness and detachment is neither new nor, in itself, cause of scandal. A 'peculiar people' is always open to the temptation to arrogance; we should re- member that this temptation afflicts the heirs of the New Jerusalem as powerfully as those of the old. We should also remember, of course, that the notion of the Christian Church as inheriting

the special divinely-appointed mission originally entrusted to the Jews, is essential to our faith, and that to this extent it is as a 'peculiar people' that Christians must demean themselves. Here again it is a question of keeping the balance.

Even in respect of the new morality, as the Bishop of Woolwich has lately displayed in his

generally admirable pamphlet Christian Morals Today, the differences between the orthodox and the innovators are not so deep as it behoves sprightly journalists to pretend. It is not to liberal theologians, but to conservative theology that we owe the twentieth-century insistence, from which the understanding of Christ's teach- ing has so much benefited, that He was nothing of a moralist, that His specific contributions to ethical theory were almost negligible, that the New Testament is about the nature of forgive- ness rather than about the nature of sin. Cer- tainly, there is nothing new (on the contrary, it

is the traditional preoccupation of casuistry) in the Bishop's insistence that even the most seem-

ingly inviolable positive laws of Church and

State may be subject to amendment, or in his emphasis on the fact that when Christ spoke of

human duty He generally expressed it in terms of the obligations inherent in particular personal situations, rather than in terms of abstract, definable and absolute law. Whether His obser- vations on adultery and fornication are the only exception to this rule may be a subject of intelli- gent and dispassionate discussion, but the Bishop, who holds that pre-marital sexual intercourse is wrong in nine cases out of ten, cannot be fairly accused of deliberately fostering sexual licence.

Surely, the real test of.the Bishop's orthodoxy is to be sought, not in what he tells us we need

not believe, but what he tells us we ought to believe, and it is this test which, I maintain, reveals the true weakness of his position.

We are to belieVe in God, Who has all the attributes of personality, but we are to do so without the aid of a visual image. We are N believe in the positive, perennial and effective intervention of Christ in human history, thougb we may do so without accepting as valid any of the most striking instances of that interven- tion reported to us by tradition. We are to be absolutely chaste and charitable, but we are to be so without the aid of those generalised rules of behaviour in which the duties comprised in chastity and charity have been customarily ex- pressed.

What really keeps the young out of church today is surely the honest difficulty they have ill reconciling with their own somewhat superficial idea of the evidence supplied by the natural sciences the Christian belief that the processes of nature and history, so full of apparent waste

and pain, are a sacrament of the Divine Love, What puts them off Christian morality in matters

of sex is surely not the feeling that one in everY ten engaged couples really ought to be sleeping with each other without incurring the censure of society, but rather the honest conviction that there can be nothing wrong in sexual activities which can be rendered socially harmless by the use of contraceptives, and which are as pleasur• able as they used to be in the days when there were practical objections to indulging in them.

To all this the South Bank Movement is utterly insensitive and wholly irrelevant. All it has done is unwittingly to suggest to the muddled, the lax and the sceptical that the eoncli forts of religion may somehow be render compatible with those of muddle, laxity and scepticism.