Faith and the Gospels
Sir: What a joy to have my prejudices reinferced by Dr Norman of Peterhouse. His caustic but factual criticisms of much that passes for Christian thinking and theology (Spectator, September 15) is timely. Having been suitably disturbed by the Dean of St Pauls quoting from Huxley (Spectator September 8), "Sit down before the facts as a little child .. .", I had begun to think that my entire experience of the Christian religion up until now had been a pale image of the truth; Fr Norman however, cheers me no end.
He refers to the debunking of "triumphalism " in the name of mutual self-groping under God for truth, and the resultant equation with "contemporary humanism," He talks of "more articulate and publicised sections of Christian opinion," being " indistin guishable from secular humanism." He talks of the "luxury radicalism of the humanist class morality of the intelligentsia." In my view, it is hopelessly superficial to make the claim that life IS religion, or that secularity is sanctity, or that a pregnant Mary writhing in the straw at Bethlehem is the same as Gertie at the Kingsbury.
We in Southern Africa have been
spared (or have been missed by?), the Humanist movement as a collective force, and have only to contend with its individual disciples. As a result. the somewhat more traditional forms of Christian thinking current in Southern Africa are able to leap-frog this, and I believe, to arrive at a contemporary synthesis of a better kind. This is especially so in the sphere of moral theology. The moral issues involved in the struggle in Southern Africa are a case in point.
Can we in fact whitewash the " freedom fighter" or " guerilla when as Norman says, he may well "be soaked in immorality in all other matters"? Can we for that matter, justify the plea here that law and order must be maintained at all costs, when we know that the status quo in which we participate does violence to individual citizens. As Norman implies, there are no slick answers.
Certainly, Man is Glorious, but only in embryo and only in his becoming. As Norman implies, we have lost any sense of eternity and what occurs now in the hic et mane, is fashionably regarded as the ultimate. Sullivan complements Norman in conceding that Christ "screwed up the demands of the moral law -more tightly than before."
Social ancl -political moral ideas must be subject to the litmus test of the personal morality of its protagonists. Is our Lord really cheering the Frelimo if they rape and burn for the good of the greater number, or am I seeing a Communist under every Cross?
B. W. Bridgewood
Cair Paravel, Kenilworth Road, Kenilworth, Cape Town, South Africa.
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