When a former Archbishop of Canterbury says that the Protestant Churches, which includes the Church of England, are approaching “meltdown”, and may be given their “last rites” any day, it is time to take notice, and accept that he is probably right. After all there have been enough warnings in the last 150 years; and almost all of them ignored. The only public debate about the limitations of religion was after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species. It was immediately recognised that this book undermined the prevalent attitude that the account of the creation described in Genesis was literally true, as opposed to its being a delightful allegory. The heated arguments that followed led to the public debate between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley. Darwin was a devout Christian, and a most self-effacing man, who listened to any criticism of his theory. But Huxley won the debate for him. In the early 1900s Professor Eucken, professor of philosophy at Jena, was writing, that though Christianity was much the best religion the world had known, the clergy of every denomination had led Christianity down the cul-de-sac of confusing reality with appearances, from which it would take a hero to extricate it. In the 1920s and 1930s Professor Eddington, who did so much to make Einstein’s Theory of Relativity known and popular in this country, openly admitted in his lectures he was a Quaker; and would surely have entered into an amicable controversy on the impact of Relativity on conventional religious belief? In the 1940s Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit loyal to his Order, was writing that science had shaken all ancient religions to the core, and they must adapt to modern knowledge or perish, particularly they must accept the abyss of Evolutionary time; though his works were only published after his death, because publication was forbidden earlier. In the late 1940s Carl Gustav Jung, who was a great admirer of England, wrote an open letter to English theologians inviting a conversation about his discoveries concerning the Psyche; but I understand even Archbishop Temple did not bother to reply. No-one could say that the C.of E. has not invited the trouble it now finds itself in. And it is almost inconceivable that anyone, like myself, could do anything significant enough to avert catastrophe, if that is what is on the cards. It would be like attempting to stem the incoming tide.
But what heed should the Church of England have paid to these warnings? Modern science has not only transformed the face of society, it has radically changed the way we think. So it should have recognised that modern science had shaken all ancient religions to the core, that its life was in peril, and that the intricacies of Jewish thought of 2000 years ago, no doubt fascinating to scholars, were unlikely to solve our problems today. It should have jettisoned any idea of the permanence of substance, or of thought, recognising that atomic physics had disposed of the permanence of substance; and Einstein’s postulate that in space-time no frame of reference is better, or worse, than any other has virtually disposed of the permanence of thought. In Einstein’s cosmos there is no room for absolute space or universal time. As Sir Edmund Whittaker expressed it in his excellent book, Space and Spirit, “the Universe is continually trying to straighten itself out”. If it is straightening itself out in the spiritual world as well as in the physical, then there is no room for permanent thought either. Creeds should have been seen as working hypotheses; and Christ’s three years Ministry and one weeks Triumph and Passion should have been welcomed as the consummation of countless ages of cosmic, geological and biological Evolution. Maybe it would have been asking rather a lot; but if the alternative was terminal decline?
However the time for recommending that has gone. Instead I re-affirm that this is a spiritual world. The alternative is to de-couple religion from social life, from political life, and from war. That I refuse to do.