Whatever happened to saving souls?

 

In the old days archbishops would regularly chastise us to save our souls. None of this was particularly odd and previous generations took this on the chin. From time to time we needed a good telling off like a cold shower to bring us to our senses. Now this is old hat (or old mitre) and the stress is not on saving souls but on saving the whole planet.  Can't we have both? What has happened?

The current occupant of St Augustine’s chair is not stranger to this, indeed, in his unfortunate interview yesterday at Glasgow (see video above) where he demonised intransigent politicians and Climate skeptics  he proved my point. Conversion is out, and the Climate is in. “Zeal for my house consumes too much fossil fuels.”  

Sometimes, you can tell a person's thinking not by what they say but rather by what they omit. Non-British folks can be driven nuts by the way we will dance around a subject and do everything and anything to avoid difficult topics. We are brought up not to bring up religion or politics in polite company. Soft southerners like me squirm and dither doing a Hugh Grant in our obsession with keeping etiquette. I am genetically hardwired with superhuman abilities to change the subject so as to sidestep awkward subjects. However, there is also a tendency in Anglicanism to wholesale "eject" a whole corpus of opinion by simply never mentioning it. This is more about rewriting theology by omission. Laterly   this is the pattern of thinking, the new zeitgeist, within Anglican hierarchy when it comes to baggage of sin, salvation, the soul, heaven, and so on. Years back this greater silence was test driven on abortion, a subject that the official church never never never mentions. 

The movers and shakers in the C of E probably still cling to some fragments of the old metaphysics. However their sympathies are more with John Lennon’s Image because to them most of this death and resurrection stuff is too embarrassing to believe. Ever worried about consumer resistance and the marketplace the Church now packages its theology so that it can supposedly enjoy the broadest appeal. This includes selling the Christian life without the burdens of conversion - which itself is now apparently something of a suspect word.  

So, cross your fingers at the Nicene Creed and instead offer the tonic of endless affirmation. Jesus is not a saviour, he’s a social justice warrior or at best a divine therapist who was born in Bethlehem “to get alongside us.” I have never quite understood why Jesus should be limited to someone who "shares our pain" rather than takes away the sins of the world and destroys death as the last enemy?  Perhaps this editing of the Gospel betrays how many Left leaning upper middle class Christians see the world around them. They know that there are lots of citizens in this country who are majorly disadvantaged, the working class for instance, but choose a safe distance where they too "can feel their pain" by lobbying government to reverse Brexit or glueing themselves to the M25 tarmac.   

When it comes to the thorny subject of Hell, only the pantomime villains, desposts and deplorables occupy its diabolical dungeons. God forbid that any vicar should imply that the conscious mind can be swayed by dark forces or that ordinary people might end up spiritually downunder. CS Lewis did this so brilliantly and lucidly in Screwtape Letters (1942) and The Great Divorce (1945) that the Anglican hierarchy never forgave him.  Hilariously he put the fictional soul of one liberal bishop as being too busy facilitating a seminar on resurrection as purely symbolic to accept an open invitation to paradise.

This same new theology holds that all our spiritual attentions should be focused on either Identity Politics or Climate Change. If we as ministers do any banging of the pulpit then it must concern carbon zero targets. By comparison giving any attention to individuals' faith journey’s could be deemed self-indulgent in a time of global crisis. Which is odd considering the massive rise in mental health problems since the Pandemic began. Much of this must surely origins in individual existential worries about mortality and life in general. Just at a time when we all needed the Church to be be surgeons of our souls, the ecclesiastical policy became to switch focus on more worldly issues. It is of course one of the temptation of the priestly job, that is to focus on everything else but the sacred tasks. Why bother hearing the same old confessions, repeat the same Holy Communion liturgy every other day, or do home visits to the elderly when you can as a vicar be doing the sexier job of saving the planet or going to a BLM demo? I sometimes detect in progressive Anglicanism a certain unspoken boredom with the bread and butter of ministry, if not Christianity as a whole.  

Some more theologically astute liberals will accuse priests like me of pandering to an outdated model of spirituality claiming that even the Bible’s story arc is not about the transformations of persons per se but the doing away of systemic sin, e.g. institutional racism or historic patriarchy. And, it’s not individual resurrection anymore but “resurrection” as some broad abstract way. "Oh, Daniel that's so dualist to believe in the whole heaven/hell thing. You need to get rid of your Platonic cosmology.. bla bla bla." In this view, addressing Climate Change will be a sort of societal resurrection presumably inspired by God. Of course, you don’t have to be Thomas Aquinas to see that this is simply social justice claptrap and woke utopianism garnished with  the shallowest of religious vocabulary.