It’s a tough confession to make, but I may have been guilty
in the past of lying in church.
This happened on occasions when I attended Christian
services, usually because I knew that it would give pleasure, or at least
comfort, to someone else if I was there.
In that spirit, I intoned with the others that I believed ‘in
one holy Catholic and apostolic Church’.
Now that wasn’t strictly a lie. After all,
I certainly believe that such a Church exists. Several, in fact, and each
convinced that theirs is the only one. Still, I’m not convinced that my belief
really honours the spirit of the affirmation.
We laid claims to lots of other beliefs too. That Jesus Christ
was the son of God, begotten not created, born of a virgin. That he was taken
and crucified and on the third day rose again. The whole shooting match,
basically.
Except that actually it wasn’t
the whole shooting match. Not by a long stretch. That was made clear to me, in
the kind of blinding flash someone really insightful provides when he explains
something obvious that has previously escaped your attention.
It was a Guardian article
that pointed out that the Nicene Creed we so glibly repeat, jumps directly from the conception and
birth of Christ to his death and resurrection. All his life in
between is just left out. Gone is the reference to its being easier for a camel
to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
Heaven. Gone is the driving of the moneylenders from the Temple. Gone indeed is
anything that might have made a structure of power and privilege at all
uncomfortable.
As the writer of the article pointed out, the Nicene Creed expressed
the views of the Roman Empire when it decided to adopt Christianity as a state
religion, without being keen on giving up any of its prerogatives. It marked
the transformation of Christianity from a religion of the poor and oppressed
into a religion of the strong and wealthy.
Who wrote that article? Giles Fraser. And last week he
resigned as Cannon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Why?
Now that’s a question worth asking. And answering.
As I mentioned in my last blog, we had visitors from France over
the weekend. On Saturday, we popped by the tented demonstration outside the
doors of St Paul’s Cathedral. The protest is directed against the ethical
decline that allowed the wealthiest members of our societies to bankrupt us and
then continue to subsidise their lifestyles at our expense. Where else in
England would be more appropriate for such a protest than the City of London, home of
our financial institutions, as well as of St Paul’s?
I have rarely seen so peaceful a demonstration. ‘Gentle’ is
probably the right word for it. When we arrived a rabbi was preaching and
occasionally chanting. Near him stood a Hindu holy man, and there were priests
of various denominations of Christianity around too. The atmosphere was that of
religiosity, of deeply but not violently held belief.
 |
| St Paul's protesters: in tents but without evil intent |
And yet the Cathedral had shut its doors, on the pretext
that the demonstration represented a health and safety threat. Next the
authorities went to court to ask for the demonstrators to be moved on; police
action was expected within a few days, with a possible descent into violence.
No wonder Fraser felt he had to resign. As he said himself,
he could imagine Christ being born in one of those tents. So what we were
seeing was the clearest illustration of one of the two sides of Christianity. The
official Church had closed its doors on those who were appealing for justice
and charity, and now it was planning to use state power against them. It was the Nicene Creed, Christianity with its compassionate
heart torn out of it.
Since then, however, the other side of the faith has
reasserted itself. Graeme Knowles, the Dean of St Paul’s who announced the closure of
the doors, has also resigned. And now the Church has dropped its legal action
and opened them again.
It seems that the tensions that the Council Nicaea tried to
settle live on unresolved in the Church to this day.
To me, though, what matters in all this is what it says of
attitudes in society.
Those people in front of the Cathedral represented no threat.
They were not aggressive. But they were different
from the image that our leaders want to project for us all. And in today’s
atmosphere of stultifying conformity, such difference is not to be tolerated.
Well, the Church’s change of heart means it will tolerated a
little longer. And perhaps on the shoulders of the protest will come a more
general awakening that says ‘I too have no wish to be the same as those who
claim to lead us. Why model ourselves on them? They destroy and then conspicuously
fail to make any contribution to rebuilding.’
If enough people pick up the challenge, then maybe we can
put the soul back into a belief system hollowed out in the Nicene Creed. And
give all of us, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Moslems, Christians and others better
values to believe in than those of the City of London.
Even the non-believers.
Even the ones who haven’t always been strictly truthful in
Church.
2 comments:
Locking the denizens of a tent city out from St Paul's is particularly unfortunate optics for the church: from the Wikipedia article on Saint Paul: "His family worked as tent-makers, a trade that Paul plied to support himself throughout his ministry."
You'd think, at some point when the church hierarchy are making decisions such as this, that it would occur to one of them to check to see if their founding documents had any insight on the matter they're confronting. Things like this make me think that they don't see themselves as Christians so much as curators - the principles are meant to be preserved and admired, but kept under lock and key and certainly not exposed to the real world where they might do some damage.
Absolutely right - though they may be curators not even of principles, merely of buildings, which I suppose makes them churchmen rather than men of the Church. Indeed, from defenders of Church property, I think they find it far to easy to slip into defending property more generally - itself difficult to reconcile with the founding concerns of the Church.
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