Welcome. I am an Anglican priest, living in the fens of Cambridgeshire and the Diocese of Ely. I am retired from parish ministry but have decided to make myself useful by setting up this site containing various thoughts and sermons.
I have a particular aim, which is to try to encourage debate on the meaning of the Christian Faith in this late phase of capitalist modernity. Capitalist modernity is a profoundly privileged time for many of us to be living in. We live a life of provision – even in this horrible period of pandemic – that our ancestors could only dream of. But there is also much in the culture of our world that acts as a distorting lens through which the Christian Faith must pass before it arrives into the lives of the faithful and much that I would argue harms the general perception of the credibility of Christian belief.
Every culture in which Christianity is preached has already constructed a social mindset of its people which must have an effect on the way is recieved and understood. There is no pristine Christianity free from the taint or the colouration of human forms of life. And this is by no means always a bad thing. Much of this cultural contextualising helps to unfold new understandings of the faith in every generation. New perspectives mean that the faith is no static thing but a living, developing thing.
However, I would argue that capitalist modernity as this has been described in the work of numerous critics, is a peculiarly desacralising, disenchanting epoch that is, thereby, essentially secular. The manner in which this has taken place is fundamentally twofold.
In the first place it is historically, uniquely rooted, in the prioritisation of the interests of economic institutions above all others, a centre ground that in pre modernity was dominated by the Church. Furthermore these economic interests are understood essentially in terms of the growth of private property. Secondly, it has by such prioritisation sponsored the most dynamic explosion of scientific, technological understanding in the history of human civilisation.
With regard to technology we are speaking of something that is applied not just in research and development of things like medicine, but also in techno-bureaucratic and managerial sciences to organise people in work and in their social lives. So, a certain notion of the rational becomes all pervasive. The ‘rational sense’ of things in disproportionately shaped by importance of money capital, and and the ‘myth busting’, iconoclastic. influence of science, and this has had a powerfully reductive tendency on peoples religiosity. It has meant that reality is automatically sensed as that which is empirically observable, measurable, quantifiable and ultimately commodified and able to be evaluated in monetary terms. Native institutional religion, however, is reduced in popular perception to being centred upon some always faintly unreal, but uplifting stories, about a transcendent realm only accessible to the private imagination. It has become something for the individual to privately hang on to whilst public reality is a space of banal meaninglessness free for all its individuals to colour as they will.
I believe that as these ways of thinking and acting in the world have become socially dominant in western society, they have constructed the fundamental human intuitions of western people so that they automatically grasp physical and social reality as continuous, indifferent and perpetual turning mechanism with no transcendent meaning. None of this means that faith is no longer possible, but it does mean that social, institutional belief such as that characterising the Church of England becomes uniquely difficult to maintain for being cut off in the fundamental social imagination – all western people including religions believers – from rootedness in our basic sense of what reality is.
With all this in mind I would want to discuss our faith within the context of the world in which we live. I also will attempt to discuss various points of faith in relation to the ordinary lives most of us live together in this world: going to work, searching for work, living in an urban environment, or in the case of the environment I am living in, an industrialised agricultural one. I wish to think of the faith through the manner in which it connects with the deepest levels of our psychology and spirit. And so I draw into the discussion various salient points of philosophical, social, political and economic ideas as they are relevant and I am able.
Finally, some of these discussion might seem difficult, but it is my intention to try and explain any em0liymrnt of technical language. I do not set out to say things that are too complicated if I can possibly avoid it. In the first place I’m simply not that clever, and in the second, my aim is to continue to serve the whole Church by posting ideas, thoughts and sermons that any moderately intelligent person will understand and which will, I hope, be of some use in supporting people’s faith.
There is something else: Christianity has been the faith of the people of this land for over 1500 years. Its teaching has underlain the formation of our collective consciousness, its wisdom has born upon our legal, political, social and moral life through all that time. But now there exists a genuine fear that this, one of the most important founding bases of our culture should disappear with hardly anyone noticing.
The British people’s sense of the relevance of the Christian faith is so diminished that it becomes reduced to a private reassurance and compensation for living within some of the harsher aspects of capitalist modernity. As there is an increasing range of more colourful, exotic and intoxicating alternatives in this market there is a danger of Christianity’s presence shrinking in the collective heart to nothing. In a society orientated to centrality of material acquisition but with downward pressure on many incomes in the lowest statistical percentiles the inheritors of the Christian tradition are understandably preoccupied with preserving their jobs, their homes and hopefully an relatively undisturbed, reasonably comfortable way of life. There maybe noises of regret from time to time as this or that church has to close, but there are fewer and fewer that see this as such a disaster as would jolt them into fulsome protest or encourage their participation in the church. How has this come about? This is a hugely important question for all of us and I would want to try and address it.
I hope to be able to say some things that will at least raise some discussion over the issue of the meaning of our faith in Britain in our time. I would dearly love to encourage interest both in and out of the Church. And I hope also to be able to invite some contributions to the debate.
I passionately believe that the Christian Faith remains essential to our existence as a people, and indeed to the human race in its wandering confusion and inchoate longing. And I hope along the way to offer some reasons why we all should be concerned about the life and death of the Christian faith in this land and maybe, just maybe, to stimulate some small spark of interest, even in those who would not normally care, in what this faith says about salvation through Jesus the Christ.