At evensong on the feast of Christ the King we heard the choir singing Purcell’s Te Deum. As the singers jubilantly repeated in an ascending phrase the word ‘all’ in ‘All the earth doth worship thee’ I wondered again about Christianity’s claim to universality. The problem haunted the day as it goes on to haunt our Christmas celebrations. Christ the King claims authority over the whole earth, just as the infant Jesus is born to be the Saviour of the world. This is one of those aspects of Christianity which I suspect we tend politely to ignore, one of those slightly embarrassing claims which is not at home in our multicultural society, where different faiths have to coexist as amicably as they can. Only fanatics make such universalising claims or so we think.
And yet if we abandon any claim to universal relevance for Christianity what do we put in its place? Do we say that it just one of those truths that people may choose to live by – it works because it’s true for us? In which case the truth claimed is extremely limited and we can have no grounds for trying to persuade others to join us, unless we treat it as an enthusiasm like the operas of Richard Strauss or baroque architecture which we want others to appreciate too. But great as such things may be they are hardly matters upon which the health of our souls depends, and that is what Christianity has always been taken to be about – the fundamental well being of our existence and the values by which we choose to live whose truth depends on their being true for everyone. These are not simply personal truths which are free to compete in the ideas market of modern relativism. You cannot render one truth to Caesar and another to God when God is the God of truth, when as some claim God is that which enables truth to be spoken at all.
One way of avoiding this problem is to present faith as fundamentally a matter of ethics. Thus if we can show that all faiths (as well as the principles of the noble atheist) share the same fundamental ethical values of justice, mercy, peace and love, then we can allow one another to go on celebrating our different rituals and telling our different stories simply as a matter of cultural and historical differences which in the end do not matter.
But for Christians at least that won’t work. What we celebrate at Christmas is not just a pretty story, whose nostalgic familiarity moves us with its supporting tastes, customs, songs and decorations, as we try to make real a dream of family, home and hearth against the background of a winter darkness. These things may be important but only because of a more fundamentally important truth contained within the story and made present in our Christmas worship. The purpose of the story is to encapsulate truths on the basis of which we are convinced to lead our lives in a certain way. What we believe to be true about God and the world, how we absorb those truths in worship and prayer, and how we live these truths in our daily lives through the moral choices we make – all go together and are inseparable.
We believe that God created all that is and so all human life and the environment in which we live is to be reverenced and treated in ways that are appropriate to a belief in their divine origin. We believe that the world is not as God meant it to be – we believe in the reality of sin and evil and we know that of ourselves we do not have the intelligence or will power to make things right – we need saving. We believe that in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we see God uniquely at work in the world initiating a process and animating a narrative whose pattern provides for us a source of understanding and inspiration kept alive within the communities founded in Jesus’ name. We believe that we are accountable to God for the whole of our lives and that we shall be judged by a merciful, just and loving God for the way in which we have responded to him and to the truth which the Christian faith represents.
That is a bald summary of our faith – a faith which if it is true must be universally true, and yet it also contains within it a guide to the way in which we are to respond to its universality. The child born in a stable, the adult who lived a ministry without home or possessions and who accepted death on a cross, is an outsider speaking to outsiders. As our carols never tire of telling us the creator of the world ‘becomes’ powerless before the powers of the world. The mission of this universal faith is an exercise in humility, the sharing of a great treasure by those who have no claim to it other than through their weakness and need for mercy. There is a sense in which this faith which claims to be universal should be the least threatening force in a world where power is universally dangerous. Perhaps the only universal faith which can be trusted is the one whose founder believed the meek to be blessed by a God who puts down the mighty and scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
There is a character in Oscar Wilde’s ‘An Ideal Husband’ who says that he ‘hates paradoxes’. The same character has just damned sympathy on the grounds that there is a great deal too much of it, to which his son replies, ‘If there were less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world’ but his father rejects that as a paradox.
At Christmas we often hear the complaint that there is too much meek mildness in our carols (I have probably complained of it in past Christmas letters). And yet in the context of Christianity’s claim to universality we become anxious about sounding fanatical and hostile to other faiths, we want to sound more mild about our claims! Christianity is nothing if not paradoxical in its preaching of a universal faith with a mild authority and a meek certainty, a universal faith which accepts trouble in its quest for universal sympathy in the name of the wounded healer with whom the sick, the outcast and the children go into the Kingdom first.
With my love and prayers for a happy and blessed Christmas,
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker