Off the Wall

A little while ago I attended a Eucharist at which Bishop Richard Randerson was the preacher, whose beliefs (or lack of them) inspired me a couple of years ago to send an article enshrining my fair, balanced and entirely admirable opinion of the said beliefs (or lack of them) to Anglican Taonga in the hope that they would print it. They didn't. Well, they made a mistake, didn't they? But I am the forgiving type, and anyway, why should you be deprived in consequence? So here follows the article:-

It seems that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men have at last managed to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, since clearly he is alive and well in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland he told Alice firmly, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less," an approach demonstrated in the article, A Randerson Sampler in the [then] latest edition of Anglican Taonga, in which Bishop Richard Randerson’s use of the word God shows that to him it means little more than a beautiful feeling, since to suggest that God is a person or a supernatural being, he says, “goes too far.”

Whatever that is, it certainly isn’t the Christian faith which Bishop Randerson promised to uphold and proclaim when he was ordained, and pretty words do not make it otherwise. He remarks that he “finds it very sad that other members of the church could really doubt the Christian integrity and commitment of someone else in the church,” and laments “the lack of respect for the conscientiously-held views of others.” I for one have every respect for his views, I just wish he would have some respect for them as well, rather than misrepresenting them as those of a believing Christian. Humpty Dumpty could hardly do it better.

Unfortunately none of this is too surprising. For years we have pandered to the local Zeitgeist terrified of seeming out of date or irrelevant. We are, after all, the Church of the chattering classes, and we like the latter to think well of us. We (the Pakeha bit, that is) are nice, well-educated, well-intentioned people with just that touch of bourgeois guilt to convince us that we really care. And care we do. There are few fashionable causes which we do not enthusiastically espouse. Take the greatest of them all, the very heart and centre of Anglicanism in this country – biculturalism. If you think I am exaggerating, just imagine what would have happened if Bishop Randerson had cast doubts on the Treaty of Waitangi instead of on the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Would his peers have been quite so understanding and supportive, do you think? I doubt it.

But even our enthusiasms are not all they should be, biculturalism itself being the principal example. You only have to look at our official logo, the Flax Cross, to see that it has no reference whatsoever to the British Isles, and thus to the Church of Alban, Bede, Patrick, Margaret of Scotland, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Cranmer, Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, William Wilberforce and a host of others. Our sacred past has been chopped off at the knees, and in its place we have a chauvinist monoculturalism with the occasional patronising (and in the Maori case, somewhat unwilling) nod towards the immediate north. Inclusive language, ecological footprints, social justice, sustainable living, cultural safety, all these and more are what really matter – with Maori as the new Latin.

These are the cuckoos which have thrown transcendence, the sacred, the sense of holiness, and the glories of heaven out of the Anglican nest – and for what? A comfortable, politically correct agnosticism, mere unbelief masquerading as rich diversity, a lack of integrity parading as courageous honesty, and the denial of the creed presenting itself as the means by which the Church might survive – as if it would have any reason to.

Whatever happened to the astonishing glories of the Christian faith? Where is the God who loved his creation so much that he allowed his creatures to torture and slaughter him, and then showed that not even our wickedness could overcome his goodness? Whatever happened to the conviction that the whole purpose of human beings is that they are to be changed from glory into glory throughout eternity? How is it that everything from the virgin birth to the physical resurrection of our Lord has to be airbrushed out of the creed as merely mythological, simply because we no longer have any conception of the greatness, the wonder, and the sheer extraordinariness of God. Clearly it would all be so much better if God could just be nice and tidy and (in a word) manageable.

Our New Zealand Prayer Book is a perfect mirror of this, replete with phrases like “Teach us to care creatively for [the earth’s] resources,” or “Strengthen us as we share in making people whole,” and (my favourite) “that we may use your gifts responsibly,” all of which sound as though they were written by rather earnest schoolgirls from one of our better suburbs. Such texts go perfectly with most of the hymns and songs in Alleluia Aotearoa! with their high-minded, almost Victorian emphasis on self-improvement; but like them they too seem largely unreal. Lex orandi, lex credendi – as you pray, so you believe – thus it often seems that our prayers are little more than the expression of our good intentions, designed to reassure us that we still have something to offer.

From the first century to the present day it has been for the love of the Lord Jesus Christ and for the hope of heaven that the saints and martyrs have lived and died. Or were Perpetua and her companions thrown to the lions for ecology and cultural safety? If you are despairing and dying, will inclusive language and social justice see you right? When you are desperate to find a meaning and a purpose to life, will sustainable living and biculturalism provide the answer? I rather doubt it. But we are not despairing or desperate. We are just a little too pleased with ourselves for that, despite the fact that we have a certain adolescent anxiety about our identity which (along with the need for some rather unconvincing self-congratulation) has been part of our national make-up for as long as I can remember.

And so we have made the Good the enemy of the Best. We have put some of our nicest and most politically correct idols with their lovely feet of clay into the place of the Living God, without really facing up to what we have done. Perhaps that is because we have used words not as a means of telling the truth, but as a figleaf for our evasions.

Surely it’s about time that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall for good.