Wednesday, 5 August 92

It’s very tempting, if a little mischievous, to ascribe my buying Hugh Dawes’ “Freeing the Faith” to one of those coincidences that more conservative believers point to as evidence of divine intervention. Just before leaving England, I had come across an article by Dawes in my parents’ “Times”. I had already bought what seemed to be a pungently written expression of the traditional point of view (and I suspect it was the pungency that attracted me as much as the content), but now here was Dawes to offer an equally provocative rebuttal. Still, when it came to begin one of these two books, it was Dawes that I chose—as being the less likely to engage my deepest sympathies, and thus better suited to providing a foil for the other. I was thus rather surprised to find, in the event, that Dawes’ is one of the most helpful books of its kind that I’ve ever read.

I won’t spend much time reviewing his perspectives on two, at least, of the issues with which I’ve had a great deal of trouble, even though Dawes’ treatment of them was not so much refreshing as genuinely liberating. The Trinity, as a device concocted by the Fathers of the Church to relate various apparently contradictory aspects of God to one another, stands revealed as I have always suspected it to be: a provisional solution that isn’t worth the energy we invest in trying to understand it. (Dawes’ similar view of the Incarnation was newer to me, as for some unaccountable reason I’ve given the matter less thought!) Finally, I have previously been used to setting aside my difficulties with the Resurrection and, especially, with life after death, by saying that true faith has to be agnostic on these questions at present; as Larkin says, “Well, we shall find out.” Dawes, though, is prepared to go further, seeing resurrection—whether ours, or that of Jesus himself—as a spreading of the enlivening influence we pass on to one another through the expression of love.

Although I found Dawes’ arguments on these topics to be convincing on the whole, he was concerned not to set them up as alternative dogmas; rather, we must work out their meaning in the context of our own lives. This paradigm of “living with questions” (to use the title of David Jenkins’ book) is one with which I’m perfectly comfortable despite its allegedly unsettling flavour of ambiguity. Of course, it’s quite another matter as to whether or not I actually spend much time considering these topics in any depth, much less in applying them—which is, presumably, the real point.

I do intend, though, to engage Dawes on an issue that underlies much of his argument: that christianity—which he refuses to capitalise, although somewhere this leads him into a sentence mentioning both the jewish people and the Romans (sic)—Dawes view, I mean to say, is that christianity has long set itself in opposition to “this world”, and that, instead, it should rather seek allies in the other contexts that structure people’s lives. Since this sentence may well become unintelligible to me as time goes on, here’s an example: the church should celebrate such events as birth and marriage, as vital events in people’s lives without any explicitly ”religious” context, and refrain from imposing on them some kind of doctrinal meaning.

This view of baptism, at least, is consistent with my own in this: I can’t believe that God (whatever that is) becomes part of people’s lives only after they are baptised. On the other hand, I also can’t see that the church’s getting involved in the celebration of birth, even as a communal rather than a “religious” event, has any value whatsoever. It may actually do harm, converting a spontaneous expression of thankfulness and love into a ritual of civic religion—a framework even more dead than Dawes’ conservative christianity, and one that ends in the vapid and judicially innocuous motto on the dollar bill, “In God We Trust”.

Christianity, says Dawes, should be involved in the world from within. But my own experience of life is often one of meaninglessness and a pervasive materialism that’s actually painful. I can’t attribute this sense to my having been indoctrinated with Augustinian views of worldly sin; if I know anything of its origins, my revulsion has an almost æsthetic tinge, as if some order was being affronted. Certainly there are instances of light, and it was undeniably the experience of these “moments of affection” that helped turn me towards faith. (Those “instants of affection”, so few that I used to be able to remember most of them individually, caught and kept my attention for twenty years. Are they now so common that they’re unremarkable?) My difference with Dawes, though, is in the relationship between meaninglessness and affection. (I avoid the metaphor of darkness and light, since I actually find the former more attractive.) To say, with Dawes, that an injunction to avoid the world is necessarily exclusivist, is to ignore that meaninglessness is the context in which we live, most of—almost all of?—the time. Affection, christianity, whatever, cannot grow from within this experience, but can only be set against it. Meaninglessness, in my experience, is predominant in life, though affection has the last word. This is Ivan’s story, in Karamazov, of its being worth the pain of walking a million million miles, just for a second of joy.

I base this argument on experience, a point I’ll come back to later on. But in another sense, my disagreement with Dawes is nothing more than semantic. Does it really matter if affection is opposed to meaninglessness, or if the two should be viewed together as integral parts of our lives? Perhaps it matters little whether we segregate out the meaninglessness and denigrate it as “the world” or if, with Dawes, we focus on the coexistence of the two aspects and celebrate “the world” as a virtual synonym for “our lives”. The important point is to admit our experience of both meaninglessness and affection!

Perhaps, then, Dawes is closer to his conservatives than he might realise. Both might find very strange a news item I came across today, in which the United Methodist Church welcomed another Supreme Court ruling against prayer in public schools. “It gets the state and the public schools out of the business of expressing religious faith,” said Tex Sample—in opposition to both conservatives and “open christians”, who would each see faith as inseparable from living our lives.

But exactly who, in Dawes’ book, are these “conservatives”? They are a mixed bag who are also known, apparently without discrimination, as “traditionists” or “orthodox”. (Dawes is reluctant, though, to surrender the latter term entirely to the black hats, and often includes it in quotation marks—ironically so, given his opposition to the idea of orthodoxy rather than to its current proponents.) As are their names, so are his opponents’ views greatly varied: those believing in demon possession are lumped together with those concerned, perhaps, only to preserve the traditional liturgy. Such a broad brush may, though, be inevitable, given that the author’s main focus is on those he likes to call, in contrast to all of the above, “open christians”.

What is it, then, that distinguishes “conservatives” (of whatever kind) from “open christians”? This last term is itself a clue. Dawes doesn’t use it to sieze the moral high ground (as happened with “pro-life” and “pro-choice”); he uses it to point to those aspects of any christianity which give it life. I’ve already suggested that these may be found even in a more “conservative” position that ostensibly sees “the world” quite differently from Dawes, but which would act towards it in the same way. What surprises me, then, in Dawes’ book, is an instance in which he appears to have closed himself off: he fails to be open to one possible source of this fundamental vitality.

If anything distinguishes Dawes from his conservatives, it is this: his refusal to acknowledge that love, or faith, or whatever name we choose, can come other than from within us, that it can have any hint about it of the “given”. Against this I can bring forward my own experience of conversion, of which one of my strongest recollections is that of faith as being “given”. But, more generally, what of the perspective given in the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy, which speaks of the Israelites’ personal experiences—which would appear to them in some sense, presumably, as evidence for faith obtained from “within”—as having been “given”, for precisely this purpose, by God. (Not that I appeal here to the Pentateuch as an authority, of course. It merely points up a logical possibility.) Dawes’ being unprepared to see faith as a gift suggests, rather, that he resembles one of his “straw” conservatives in his insecurity: in opposing even the possibility of supernatural grace, he “doth protest too much, methinks”.

And, at last, I find this distinction not so much semantic as important. For even Dawes appeals to love as having its own authority and, if this is not given, in what does this authority lie? It can indeed be intrinsic; I don’t suppose that supernatural authority is its only possible source. But, if intrinsic, in what does love’s uniqueness consist? For example, although “moments of affection” have been vitally attractive to me, so also has been the æsthetic principle, and even that of melancholy. (I set all three against the meretricious appeal of what I have loosely called materialism.) If it were purely up to me, purely a question of personal choice, I might well have opted for beautiful sadness, rather than love, as the most vital call in my life.

Dawes encourages us, provokes us, stimulates us to reexamine and reinterpret our faith in the light of our own lives and those of others. A truly “open” christian, it seems to me, could acknowledge that the willingness and the power to do this vital work come from outside ourselves. ( )