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The Fourth Corbishley
Memorial Lecture - 1980 When Martin Luther held his famous colloquy with Zwingli in the Schloss at Marburg in the early years of the 16th century, he strongly opposed Zwingli’s view of the Sacraments. Luther contested that Zwingli’s reductionism would inevitably lead to a loss of "that unity of word and deed, of picture and thing, of the bread and the glorified body: "body would become merely body:" contested Luther and "symbol merely symbol." Luther may have won the debate, but in Western European thought I believe that Zwingli won the day. Luther while rejecting transubstantiation and affirming in its place con-substantiation had nevertheless permitted a breakdown in the Medieval philosophical synthesis between matter and spirit, sacred and secular, the kingdoms of this world and the kingdoms of Christ; that each would then go its own way and each would vie with the other for supremacy and allegiance. You may wish to question and even reject the Thomistic language by which it had been possible throughout the Middle Ages to hold together these two categories of thought. Indeed Luther did object to the precise language of transubstantiation and there would be few today who would wish to reassert the particular philosophical formula which lies behind such language. Nevertheless, the essential exercise of the Middle Ages was its refusal to put asunder what it profoundly believed that God had joined together, for the genius of the Medieval world was its successful struggle to hold together in its sacramental and incarnational theology what in the modern world we have increasingly separated. By the 20th century, Christianity and science are seen as opposing forces who after a long period of struggle for supremacy have slowly retreated into a cold war and finally a truce and conspiracy of silent indifference. Luther was right: body has become "merely body" and symbol "merely symbol": the world of matter is the concern of the materialist while the world of the spirit is the concern of the religious. Nothing could be further from the claims of Christianity and nothing could undermine culture in Europe more profoundly and seriously than such an alienation. Culture must be built upon the foundations of a religious vision in which matter matters and in which the exploration of the Creation is also part of the adoration of the Creator. For the genius of medieval Christian theology had been its ability to hold together word and deed: picture and thing: bread and the glorified body. At every level since Christmas day 800 AD when the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor had committed themselves after a long and strenuous courtship to a marriage which was indissoluble, there had been achieved in the West a healthy synthesis of one flesh which had finally turned its back upon the Hellenistic views of earlier ages and the secular, political and ecclesiastical, matter and spirit. The world of visible and tangible evidence was a picture of the interior world of reality and substance. However difficult it may have been to find the language in philosophy and the State the agenda of concern was the same and both shared the sovereignty in all matters asserting a unity at the heart of all human experience. It may have been a difficult Humpty Dumpty to hold on the wall of Medieval theology and thought, and, indeed by the end of the Middle Ages the egg-shaped figure of Humpty Dumpty looked ill at ease on the various foundations upon which he was perched, but nevertheless he reigned there as one image and icon and saved the world of the West from the schizoid mentality which invades our life at every level today. Unseat him and indeed it will take "all the king’s horses and all the king’s men" to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Our Western world is inevitably schizoid in bits and pieces and it is no accident that we have arrived at this position. In the Middle Ages the Church embraced society at every level. Dante’s poem "The Divine Comedy" written in the opening years of the 14th century represented the universe as a series of ten translucent and concentric globes or spheres. The earth was enclosed within the spheres of the moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The 8th sphere was the sphere of the Fixed Stars; beyond that was the 9th, the sphere of the Fixed Stars; beyond that was the 9th, the sphere of the first mover (Primum Mobile) which imparted motion to all the remainder although it had no star attached to it. Each of these transparent, crystalline globes was moved by Intelligences or Spirits; the 9th which moved more rapidly than the rest, as was indeed fitting for the sphere nearest to Heaven, was impelled by the highest of celestial beings. Heaven constituted the 10th and final sky, being the home of God and his Saints, it was immobile, eternal and infinite. This was the goal of all human effort and divine movement, or as Miss Dorothy L. Sayers puts it in her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy:
In the very centre of this system the unmoving earth was placed, at the heart of which lay the holy city of Jerusalem. That unity of the outward and visible world was itself only a picture and projection of an interior reality and unity which motivated both the living organism of man and the inanimate structure of the whole of creation. We cannot put the clock back to that time of synthesis nor is the main purpose of my address tonight to indulge in a kind of nostalgia for a past which can never return. Nevertheless I profoundly believe that culture needs this kind of harmony at its heart and that the debate between Christianity and Science is crucial for the survival of culture. Furthermore, that we shall not witness in our lifetime a return to a culture of depth and reality unless we can achieve something of the same kind of synthesis which possessed the Middle Ages. I am making a passionate plea that at least the dialogue between Christianity and Science should remain open and continuous and that a cold war is better than a truce for at least it admits that both parties have an interest in continuing to talk and to contest over the same territory. May we therefore look tonight at some of the root causes for the breakdown of the relationship between scientific thought and Christian theology which has occurred since the time of Descartes? We are tempted to suppose, and certainly popular myth would affirm, that when the breakdown came it was because of the emergence of science in the Renaissance and the ultimate triumph of science in the 18th and 19th centuries leading to the popular position today in the 20th century whereby it would be assumed by the man-in-the-street that there was a basic incompatibility between a scientific outlook and a commitment to Christian faith. In history there is little in fact to support this kind of simplistic thesis and so I think it is important that we disown this over-simplification from the outset. For historical evidence would not in fact show that science was essentially alien to Christianity nor indeed does experience suggest that it should continue to be so. When the Renaissance returned with new vigour to the classical world of Greece and Rome, it did so largely under the patronage - frequently even under the roof - of the medieval church. I am not saying there were no disagreements between Christianity and science - far from it. There were frequently times of healthy war and contest between these rival disciplines. On the contrary, it is precisely for that rivalry that I am pleading tonight for both parties have a stake - or should have - in the same territory of concern for at their best neither Christianity nor science would be prepared to say that the observable and tangible world could be left in the hands either of one party or another. So in the 17th century Francis Bacon the Chancellor of England wrote the many books which together composed his "Novum Organum" in which he argued that all natural knowledge must be treated as a whole, that the various sections and subjects must be surveyed and studied together, and that, though religion and revelation were on a different plane, the proper method must be that of exact observation, careful classification and the inductive disclosure of general principles. After him the Czech bishop, John Amos Comenium travelled widely over Europe trying to establish colleges for the universal pursuit of wisdom and learning -colleges in which religion, art, history, science and philosophy should be studied in co-operation. His visit to Britain was one of the events which led to the foundation of the Royal Society. Similar institutions were set up in many other centres and thus the scientific outlook was championed and spread throughout Europe. But notice at this stage it was not in any sense seen over and against other disciplines - least of all the discipline of theology. If we attempt to estimate the religious effects of the new philosophy at the close of the 17th century for example, we must first observe that, in spite of some exceptions, the Church supplied most of the leaders of scientific enquiry, and those men were enthusiastically Christian. In Britain for example, almost every one of the men of genius who brought the country to a position of acknowledged leadership and founded many branches of science, subscribed to the belief that in the study of the wisdom of God in his creation, they were striving to think God’s thoughts after him. And, under the inspiration of the Cambridge Platonists and not a few of the bishops, a Christian philosophy of organism was formulated by Ralph Cudworth and popularised by John Ray. They opposed Descartes in much of his reductionist and mechanistic thinking about animals and their behaviour and they clung tenaciously to a vision of the whole of life belonging to one whole outlook. Where then, we might well ask, did the alienation between Christian thought and scientific thought begin? What was its root cause? There are still some today who would argue that the whole methodology of both these disciplines is at root totally opposed. I would want very strongly to attack that premise. I would want to claim without any apology that the methodology of science and the methodology of faith are remarkably identical. Both begin with a basic hypothesis and test that hypothesis: both are pragmatic though of course both are in danger alike of reverting to being dogmatic. So it is that in a book entitled "Physicist and Christian" Alan Wilkinson writes as follows: "both becoming a Christian and becoming a scientist involve incorporation into a community, sharing its accumulated knowledge and wisdom, growing into its outlook and venerating its saints. Only when one has received a tremendous amount can one begin to make an original contribution." In other words providing that you will admit as evidence a wide range of categories of experience then both science and religion walk by faith and not by sight for both science and religion alike are striving for an overall view of cause and effect throughout the whole of human experience. Both scientist and Christian are in the truth game - and that trust must belong to one piece and to one whole outlook if theology is to have any meaning at all. Sometimes it is even contested that by the 19th century it had actually become impossible for a scientist at all to hold the Christian faith with integrity. I am sure this is a dangerous half-truth and belongs more to retrospective historical manipulation than to facts and persons as they existed in the 19th century itself. It may be true that many scientists in the 19th century did not hold a Christian faith but that may in fact be saying more about a particular person involved on the one hand or more about the sort of Christian faith they were asked to accept on the other rather than on any intrinsic alienation between the two disciplines. Professor Owen Chadwick in his two volumes on the Victorian church is at pains precisely to make just this point: he writes, "we must distinguish between science when it was against religion and the scientists when they were against religion. Scientists were men and some of them were religious and some of them were not. This is a distinction essential to our understanding of what happened. If a scientist attacked Christianity, the public (after it accepted the unquestioned axiom that ‘science’ was in conflict with ‘religion’) instantly inferred that the scientist attacked Christianity because he was a scientist. But it was not so or was not always so. Scientists were also men, and there might be many other reasons why a man should assail religion, for example that he was in revolt against his father who was religious. Wallace in the middle years assailed Christian orthodoxy. As he was one of the founders of the doctrine of natural selection, men might easily infer that his science led him to assail orthodoxy. But it was not true. For Wallace assailed orthodoxy before he knew anything about evolution. His science simply offered him new arguments to strengthen the old. John Tindell attacked the doctrine of the miraculous at the Bampton Lectures by J.B. Moseley. Because Tindall was becoming prominent as a physicist and geologist it was easy to assume that he represented the natural scientists in his criticism. But the arguments which he used against Moseley did not arise out of his scientific training for they were the strong arguments of an amateur philosopher and came rather from the reason than from the empirical examination of nature. In May 1889 Professor Flower of the Natural History Museum complained indignantly to the Dean of Windsor about this misunderstanding. He said "it is very hard and very unfair that, because Huxley and Tindall happen to be scientific men of the first order, and happen also to be opposed in some sense to the truth of religion, scientific men generally should be ticketed as though they belong to the same school of thought. Both Huxley and Tindall were anti-religious in a dogmatic sense long before they had made any mark in science and their views on these subjects cannot therefore be regarded as a legitimate outcome of scientific thought and scientific knowledge." Suppose we return then to the first of my possible explanations. If it is true that many eminent scientists of the 19th! Century did not hold a Christian faith it may say something about the nature of the Christian faith that they were asked to hold. That in a nutshell is the contention of my paper which I am presenting this evening. I believe there are at least four factors which we need to look at under the heading of the kind of faith which scientists were asked to wrestle with if we are really to pursue this whole discussion of the relation- -ship between Christianity and science in European thought. If we take as an overall unquestioned thesis that the Protestant religion of the Reformation flourished in those countries where Capitalism and Industrialism flourished most, then I think we begin to see something of the difficulties which began to arise between the two disciplines of science and Christianity after the Reformation in Western Europe. I realise that Tawney’s thesis has had many question marks placed around it and I realise also that there are many other factors which led to the overlap between Protestantism and the rise of Capitalism after the Reformation, but I think that his main thesis has been largely unquestioned - that is to say that Protestantism brought to industrial Europe a work ethic and an inspiration which released enormous energies in the direction of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Capitalism. But suppose we could graft on to Tawney’s thesis the further obvious inference namely that science was at its most triumphant in places of strong industrial and technological development. Then we begin to see that science at its most conspicuous in recent years was asked to relate basically to the Christianity of the Protestant and Reformed churches. It would not then be unreasonable to ask the nature of this faith and even to see if certain essential criteria in that faith were lacking - criteria which would have aided a genuine and continuing dialogue between Christianity and science. For what is certain is that there can be little doubt that by the end of the 19th century and the opening of our own century in Western European culture, religion and science had settled on a truce and each had left the other to go its own way to the detriment of both parties. So Charles Raven in his book "Christianity and Science" writes; "those who by the end of the 19th century attempted to hold on both to the findings of scientists and to the faith of the Church, found themselves in a position of a circus rider who desiring to bestride both of two horses, should find them proceeding at top speed in opposite directions." A most uncomfortable position! Of course, I realise that it is hard to apportion blame fairly for it is true that both religion and science have in turn played the tyrant and each at various times has not been without its chapters of triumphantism. While I am not however particularly competent to bring the scientist to heel in order to re-engage both parties in some kind of dialogue and debate, nevertheless I am perhaps competent to let charity begin at home on my own territory of theology and to wrestle with that side of the discussion. Such is my purpose tonight. The point of my protest is that industrial prosperity flourished in Protestant countries: science flourished in the environment of industrialism therefore the rifts between science and Christianity is primarily a rift between science and Protestantism and it is perhaps therefore to something of the deficiencies of Protestantism as it emerged from the jungle of the Reformation period that we need to turn our attention if we are to hold out any hope of ‘detente’ between these tow parties. I wish to trace at least four areas of where I believe the Protestant and Reformation churches have been holding a deficient theology. In the first place the first of these theological deficiencies is to be found in the over-riding Protestant doctrine of God - a doctrine which was largely influenced by Calvin and Zwingli in the post Reformation churches. Macquarrie writes: "Calvin laid great stress on the sovereignty of God; that is the main theme of his whole theology. And, as you read it, you can’t help thinking that this picture of God which he sets up is suspiciously like that of the King of France. But before we laugh at Calvin let us think of some of the things in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: ‘high and mighty, king of kings, lord of lords, who from thy throne dost behold all that dwell on the earth.’" Macquarrie comments: "it reminds me rather of Henry VIII and he is not really one of my favourite people: It visualises God as utterly sovereign and transcendent. In some ways more appropriate to Islam than to Christianity." This you see is very much tinged with the theism and deism which held sway so strongly in Unitarian Birmingham and the industrial Midlands of our own country throughout the whole of the 19th century. It is the remote ‘deus ex machina’ of Paley’s ‘Evidences’ of the 18th century with its clock-maker view of the universe - a god creating his world and occasionally intervening or interfering with it but definitely remote from it and sovereign beyond it. If you hold such a view of God I am not surprised that you might find it hard to reconcile that sort of view of the Creator with an informed fascination with his creation. Before long, such a God will be relegated simply to the god of the gaps - gaps left over when science has finished explaining and unravelling. If you place the Creator too much over and above his creation and do not balance that doctrine with an imminent theology of God within his creation then before too long you allot to theology the left-overs of what cannot be explained any other way. The larger your vision of the creation the smaller your vision of the Creator unless you can hold both the creation and the Creator in an imminent relationship as well as a transcendent one. Theologians need to reclaim again the vision of the prophet Isaiah not strangely enough in the mistranslation of the authorised version but in the proper translation of the continuous present tense which should therefore be rendered correctly as: "thus says God, who is creating the heavens and spreading them out, who is giving shape to the earth and what comes from it, who is giving breath to its people and life to the creatures that move in it." There even in the book of the prophet Isaiah is a doctrine of continuous creation in which there is an inner relationship between God the Creator and the matter and stuff of creation and in the evolving of life through breath and through the relationship between the inanimate world and the animate world. It is that same God who Saul when he became Paul in his cosmic vision of creations in Romans chapter 8 saw as the creator interlocked with his creation in a continuing "travail" which is still at work bringing to birth through pain and vulnerability a fuller and richer creation from immaturity to maturity - growing, evolving and developing. It was no less than the great figure of Charles Raven who used to lecture us when I was a young man at Cambridge who laid such emphasis upon the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans and who gave a majesty and vision to the great words of Paul who sees the process of continuous creation in terms of "the whole creation groaning and travailing and waiting for adoption" through the sons of God. Yet this kind of theology of God is a long leap from the detached deism and theism of the 18th and 19th centuries which was indifferent alike to imperfection and suffering within the natural order. It was the Anglican bishop Westcott at the end of the 19th century who wrote "we are tempted to worship with conventional service a God who has withdrawn himself from the world which he has made for a God whom we can localise." Westcott is rightly attacking such a transcendent view of God’s sovereignty for if that is your doctrine of God, he will be a God who must retreat before an ever flowing tide of the rational explanation of scientific probing, until his sovereignty reflects something of that of King Canute -left with little more than the leftovers of pious platitudes from those who have special interest in the electric and the peripheral. Secondly Christianity of Protestant Industrialised Europe had dethroned an infallible Pope but had rapidly enthroned an infallible Bible. As the Bible increasingly became the book of the people it strangely tinged with a biblicism and a fundamentalism - for it is never long before man left to himself will reveal the traits of his character as those of a compulsive idolater always seeking the infallible and the untouchable source of truth. Such was the popular image of the Bible which rested on the shelves of every Tom, Dick and Harry in Protestant industrialised countries during the last century. It was around that book in general and around the story of Genesis in particular that the furious debate about evolution was to take place and let there be no mistake about it, that that particular debate is still part of the collective sub-conscious of the whole of Western culture in general and English speaking culture in particular. You have only to talk for a little while to any Sixth Form today to realise that the man in the street still believes that the Christian has to bury his head like an ostrich in the sands of irrationalism if he is to square his post-Darwinian view of creation with the Biblical picture in the Book of Genesis. Of course it is hard to know quite why this should be so. It was the Alexandrian school as early as the 3rd and 4th centuries in general and St. Clement of Rome, St. Iraneus, Tertullian and Origen in particular who always left a large scope for an allegorical interpretation of scripture especially in the Old Testament and most particularly in the book of Genesis. This was not lost in the teaching of Ambrose of Milan in the 4th century nor St. Augustine leading into the 5th century and it was a well known discipline of the School men of the Middle Ages to approach the Bible and scripture generally allowing at least one grid of allegorical interpretation upon the huge map of scripture. Significantly it was the 16th century reformers such as Luther, Melancthon, Calvin and others who explicitly repudiated all allegorical interpretation according to their guiding principle of "scriptura scripturae interpres". This remained the usual attitude of Protestant exegesis to the present day and of course it is that attitude which is most difficult to relate to the teachings of Darwin and the geological scientists of the 19th century. It is hard to believe that there would have been the same open warfare between Darwin’s hypothesis about creation in the 15th century and earlier schools of Biblical exegesis. The fault may well be more on the side of the latter or at least as much on the side of the latter as on the side of the former in any breakdown of confidence between these two parties in this debate. Thirdly there is and perhaps most seriously the abandonment by Protestant industrial Europe of any attempt to reclaim an incarnational and sacramental theology in its understanding of the universe. The Protestant and the Puritan alike read their Bibles in which there was one word which stood for two Greek words - I am referring to the word in English "world" which has at least two words in Greek. Protestant and Puritan alike were hasty in seizing upon such phrases as "do not love the world or the things of the world, if anyone loves the world the love of the Father is not in him." (1 John chapter 2 v.15.) It was not a long leap from there to see matter, money, sex, the body, art and the theatre as objects to be avoided by the Christian in the name of spiritual discipline. Of course a more careful reading of scripture would soon lay hold of contradictory texts - e.g. "God so loved the world." It does not require intense scholarship to distinguish the two Greek words rendered in English by the one word ‘world’. Of course the scripture tells us to steer clear of the passing age or fad or fashion but equally scripture from cover to cover exhorts both the Jew and the Christian to love the world - the created order -as God loves it. I believe that you could place much of English speaking piety on the back of two mistranslations in the Authorised Version - the words are world and flesh. Both words have shades of meaning which issue in totally different attitudes and yet of course in the Puritan and Protestant English speaking world they are both words which demand unqualified rejection in an over simplified and popular version of Christian attitudes. What is clear however is that in 19th century Western industrialised Protestantism, matter was going to be left once and for all to the materialist: the spirit was in a separate department and neither could check, balance or embrace the other: Luther was right that where there was no true sacramental theology, body would become "merely body" and symbol "merely symbol". It is no less than a conspicuous figure from the Orthodox Church of the East - Archbishop Anthony Bloom - who challenges Western theology in a series of addresses to nurses and doctors along the following lines: "I think it is terribly important that all our churches should rethink the problems of matter, of the Incarnation, of the Sacraments, of miracles, because what makes our theology so hopelessly inadequate is that we all, implicitly or explicitly, accept the material world on the terms of the materialist and, having accepted the material world in that way, we then put on top of it, or push into it, things like Incarnation, the change of bread and wine to the Body and Blood of Christ, the miracles, and so on. We then have to work out two kinds of theology. It is either a magic theology, or a theology that makes nonsense of what we are saying. When we say, for instance, ‘in a spiritual manner’ we usually mean ‘I don’t believe it, but I say it’: because we do not make friends ‘in a spiritual manner’; we do not eat our lunch ‘in a spiritual manner’. We do things ‘in a spiritual manner’ only when we want to keep the word safe from our complete disbelief in the event. We will never solve this problem unless we have an adequate theology of things material, and then we can as doctors, nurses, chaplains and so on, think of the bodies of people whom we treat in quite new terms, in terms that begin with a seed sown in corruption and ending with the Transfiguration and the Ascension and the Sitting at the right hand of the Father." The Archbishop is right when he realises that we will never solve this problem unless we have an adequate theology of things material and we will never have an adequate theology of things material as Christians unless we have a strong doctrine which is both sacramental and incarnational. Medicine, Sciences, Economics, all are permitted in our contemporary world, alas, to ‘do their own thing’ and to play the king of the castle without reference to what has been relegated to being "merely spiritual". This is the ultimate reductionism of Descartes - this is ‘Occam’s razor’ in its last days. But how can we accept this antithesis and polarisation if we have a strong sacramental understanding of the whole universe and are determined to reclaim it under the true sovereignty of God through the Incarnation, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ who is Lord of all? For we did not really need to wait for the discovery of the chemical acid of life itself to project one huge canvas from the world of inanimate matter to the world of animate matter if we had had throughout a high and strong doctrine of the Word made Flesh and equally the descent into Hell and the recapitulation of all things into Christ. Of course we may not at the present time have an adequate philosophical formula with which to package the product of a sacramental and incarnational theology but nevertheless I believe it is the duty of Christians to reassert the value of this unique product and to refuse to purvey it only in spiritual and pious platitudes." If Jesus is not Lord of all, he really is not really Lord at all." My fourth and final challenge to Western industrial Protestantism is in its refusal to hold together the gospel of the Kingdom and the Social order of the day. For once you sever, as Zwingli did, and as Calvin championed, the unity between flesh and spirit, the city of this world and the kingdom of God, Jerusalem below and Jerusalem above, you will reduce Christian concern to mere piety and soul-searching on the one hand while you will leave the slums, violence and the concrete jungle on the other hand to those who have a purely materialistic view of the universe and the reductionists’ view of the nature of man. Our modern cities are no mere accident: they are the inevitable end product and result of 300 years of functionalism and reductionism. The architect and planner is simply giving an outward and visible sign in the form of the contemporary city which is a desert of the inward desert which we have left in the heart of man. Of course the Christians in the meantime have spoken with a certain nostalgic indifference about the Garden of Eden and the aesthetic beauty of holiness while the pragmatist, the scientist and the economist have pressed ahead and inevitably produced deserts of materialism in which word and deed, picture and thing bear no relation whatever to each other. Charles Raven again writes in his book on ‘Christianity and Science’: "it is hardly necessary to recall the revolutionary changes which by the end of the 19th century were taking place in the whole field of applied science, or the almost equally remarkable developments in social and international life. Inventions breaking down the barriers of space and changing the meaning of time ranged from the bicycle and the locomotive and the steamship to the telegraph the telephone and to the X-rays . . . so too social studies were disclosing new types of evil for which no one individual was responsible and which no one individual could cure or wholly escape. The churches, which had appealed almost entirely to individuals and individual piety, had left no social message readily available and a sense of helplessness and frustration was almost inevitable. Karl Marx, though not as yet widely influential, had formulated his theory of history; and the recognition of economic influences on the whole life of man and even economic determinism, were rapidly spreading. The whole trend of thought favoured a naturalistic or at best an agnostic interpretation of existence; there was no room in such science for any idea of God; and even those who maintained the value of religion and the validity of religious experience were driven to a dualism which allowed two alternative, but perhaps overlapping, frames of reference for the interpretation of existence. That science and religion have nothing in common, and that the frontier between them must be strictly drawn, clearly defined and scrupulously observed, was an affirmation commonly accepted." I would rather want to correct if I may Charles Raven, by saying that such an idea of God as held sway in Western industrialised Protestant society, left no view or no room for the concern in those areas in which science had become so formative. I believe that unless we rediscover a profoundly sacramental understanding of society, planning and architecture and the city of today, there will be no hope for Western culture and society tomorrow. For the seeds of our present discontent were sown long ago and violence and city strife are no mere unfortunate accidents of the present time: they are the price that you pay for the long standing divorce between the outward and visible and the inward and spiritual - and that divorce was right at the heart of the debate between Zwingli and Luther as far back as their discussion together in the Schloss at Marburg in the opening years of the 16th century. The planner and the architect must have access to a sacramental understanding of man, of community and of society. We must believe that man is and always will be a corporeal person: he will always be looking for a body: midway between this body which inhibits and isolates and the Resurrection body which he will be given, is the extension of our bodies in corporate community life which is called the city. The city of man and the city of God (as Augustine so brilliantly saw) are related and are even now interwoven and interdependent. It is not an accident of theatrical presentation that John Merrick with his hideously distorted body in the play ‘The Elephant Man’ should plan and build the most beautiful model of a church (which can still in fact be seen in the London Hospital to this day) as an outward and visible sign of his own inner experience while at the same time crying in distracted tones: ‘I believe in heaven.’ At the heart of the Christian life is the prayer which must itself be an economic slogan committing the one who offers the prayer to seek to do the will of God on earth as it is in heaven. Reduce that to the particularity of bricks and mortar, steel and concrete, housing and roads, community ventures and centres of communication and you will begin to forward the work of the Incarnation as well as to hallow the universe around you with the same adoration as is afforded to the host of bread when it is hallowed at the altar of the Eucharist. I have tried to show how Protestant industrial society and scientific development have ended up by not relating to the world of Christian theology and I have it is true laid an enormous amount of the blame for this at the feet of Protestant Western theology in the Reformation churches. You may ask why I would have selected such a theme as this for the Corbishley Lecture. I hope the reasons in many ways are self-evident. Tom Corbishley as a member of the Society of Jesus was committed in his life-long pilgrimage to holding together precisely the opposites of which I have spoken today. Father Corbishley as an individual and the Society of Jesus in general have ruthlessly pursued a vocation in which at least reason and revelation remain in constant dialogue with each other. It is a precarious vocation for frequently it is misunderstood from both sides. It is not accidental that a member of the same Order - Teilhard de Chardin - should have made such a conspicuous contribution to the kind of discussion that I have been leading this evening and equally that he should have received both from the world of science and the world of faith sharp criticism to the point of being disowned by both parties. However I do believe that the witness of this way in theology and science belongs to a whole tradition which has never been wholly lost. I would want to point in the 19th century to Anglican Divines such as Gore and Westcott. I have recently rediscovered "The Incarnation and Common Life" and "Christus Consummator" both by Bishop Westcott, and both of these volumes written at the end of the 19th century have inspired me enormously to write as I have done in this lecture. This golden thread of Anglicanism was taken up again in the 20th century by such men as Temple and Ian Ramsey in the realm of philosophy. Charles Raven to whom I have had frequent reference in this lecture was certainly someone who inspired me as a young man and thousands of others in his relentless refusal to let go of either end of the discussion in asserting the importance of both the discipline of science and Christian theology. However perhaps the most (conspicuous name in a wider span of this discussion is none other than John Henry Newman himself. May I quote at length from one of his sermons:
There is the golden tradition and I believe it is still the voice of one crying in the wilderness. This is the prophecy which alone can reconcile Christianity and science and restore again a right synthesis. It will not be the same Humpty Dumpty back on the wall for you can never recapture history in that way, but let there be no mistake that this is the task in our generation if the culture of Western Europe is to be renewed. Top |
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