But the suicide bomber does raise in a dramatic form the question of what is likely to happen to us in the next world, if indeed there is a next world. Not that I am bothered about the fate of the bombers themselves, although all my instinct is that they will be in difficulties. Rather, what is going to happen to those people in this country, who seem to think survival at any price is the only good? It is not much good going to the Church for an answer, because not many people have much confidence that it knows the answers. Christianity has been declining ever since the start of the enlightenment; that is to say from about the 1720s. Gibbon regarded Christianity as one of the principal factors in the decline and fall of Rome; and I suspect he regarded it as a subversive influence in any community. He despised religion. And you only have to read Jane Austin to discover that country parsons were regarded in her day as nonentities. The further decline of the Church in the 19th century is exemplified by the sad life of John Henry Newman, who first championed the Oxford Movement, and then after his conversion to Rome did his best to destroy it.
But the decline was rapidly accelerated with the Church’s refusal to come to terms with science. First the debate between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley about Darwin’s massive discoveries in regard to fossils and the age of the earth. Then at the turn of the century by Einstein’s theory of relativity, with its hypothesis that in the world of space and time no one frame of reference is better, or worse, than any other; which must call in question the idea that religious knowledge is different from any other kind of knowledge. In their folly, the leaders of the Church failed to insist that their supreme truth was that God had created the universe, and it didn’t matter much how he had done it; instead they insisted they had a superior kind of knowledge, which simply was not true.
Finally in the late 1940s Jung, who was a great admirer of England, invited English theologians to enter into a dialogue with him about his findings in the world of the mind and the unconscious. They declined; even Arch-bishop Temple I understand failed so much as to answer his letter. Such rudeness is only equalled by the taunt attributed to Sam Wilberforce, at the debate in Oxford, “And is it on your mother’s side or your father’s side, Mr.Huxley, that you are descended from a monkey?” Huxley is said to have muttered under his breath, “God has delivered him into my hands”; and replied, “If I had to choose between being descended from a monkey, or from a man who perverts the truth, I would be hard pressed to know which choice to make”. But at least the debate between science and religion did not lead to violence, as it had done in the Arius-Athanasius debate both before and after Nicea.
So if the official answers are unlikely to command much confidence, we have little option but to revert to the most likely speculations. Some people doubt that there is a next world; but if that is right, there is simply no point in ever sacrificing oneself for others.