I have been a bishop for twenty years and I have never been called upon to celebrate the anniversary of the consecration of a graveyard extension. Napoleon was heading for the battle of Borodino in June 1812 but in Hampstead you were thinking long term, and making proper provision for the reverent disposal of human remains.
As in a game of chess people are mesmerised by the play on the surface. Pawns being mowed down; generals and emperors cavorting while the bishops are approaching everything slantwise but beneath the surface play there is the deep structure – the board or the earth itself and the rules. The deep of your graveyard accommodates Evelyn Underhill the mystic as well as the Editor of Punch as well; together with politicians and actor managers who have lived through an astonishing period of two hundred years.
In 1812 the old system in church and state was struggling with the implications of new wealth, urbanisation and a rapid rise in population. The church was among those institutions savagely criticised but resistant to reform. “I would that these foolish ordinations would cease now that the Church of England is recognised as being not useless only but positively deleterious”. No not Polly Toynbee but Joseph Hume, a radical MP speaking in 1832. But while he was speaking the sleeping giant was waking up. In the North the Brontes noticed a “shower” of curates descending on the Yorkshire dales. Here in London profiting from the ideas of the Scottish minister Thomas Chalmers, one of the most underestimated opinion formers of the 19th century, my predecessor Bishop Blomfield set about building new parish churches, schools and dispensaries, all financed by voluntary giving.
The United Kingdom ceased to be a confessional state in the late 1820’s with Catholic Emancipation the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. The political sphere was opened to all Christians and very soon with the City of London in the lead to Jews and members of other faiths. The consequence was that even the Conservative Government of Robert Peel, a devout churchman, refused to assist the programme of church extension as it had done previously in the immediate aftermath of Waterloo.
There was a free market in religious ideas. The attempt to create a religious monopoly had failed – thank God. On the Continent wherever some branch of the Christian church succeeded in achieving a legal monopoly and a close relationship with the political status quo, those who were agitating for change tended to see the Christian Church as an enemy. In France, Italy, Spain, Prussia, Russia there developed large left wing atheist political movements. In England the Tolpuddle Martyrs were led not by Marxist agitators but by Methodist lay preachers and the membership of the British Communist party has at no time ever exceeded that of the Lord’s Day Observance Society.
Still the transition which distanced the Church of England from the State led to a reconstruction of the identity of the Church in the work of Evangelicals and members of the Oxford movement. The effort put into the education of the young was prodigious and before the Foster Education Act of 1870 the Church was educating a million young Britons a day.
The Church of England recovered its nerve. These were the years of apparent triumph; of a church sharing in the prestige of a supremely self-confident culture. There were intellectual rumblings but the church felt very much at home in the Age of Improvement in which mission to the heathen at home and abroad flourished.
The First World War was the end of the first age of globalisation in which Britain had played such a crucial part. We shall soon be remembering the centenary of the outbreak of war in 1914. We cannot change the past but it is desperately important how we remember it. The myth of progress was dealt a mighty blow. The laboratory of European civilisation was engulfed by a vast graveyard.
As the war memorials spread, the liberal optimistic version of the Christian faith came to seem inadequate to deal with the scale of the suffering and the revelation of the beast within. In theology Karl Barth’s work reflected the change of mood but for many people as the old world staggered on bereft of the fresh energies of those who had perished at the front, they just could not see the point of Christian faith any more. They could understand the value of a parish church like this in its positive impact on social life but their attitude was summed up by one the greatest of 20th century Prime Ministers, Clement Atlee who said that “I believe in the ethics of Christianity but not the mumbo jumbo”. Instead we were caught up in the drama of more and more; of growth without limit in which the process itself was sufficiently exciting not to require us to think about where it might end.
20 years ago Consumer Unbeliever International – to borrow a phrase from the late Ernest Gellner seemed to be on top of the world. Francis Fukuyama the American historian and sometime State Department official wrote a book entitled The End of History. The thesis was that the advent of liberal democracy and market economics signalled the consummation of the human history.
Since then it has become clear that the spiritual evolution of human beings has some way to go. Even the Editor of the Economist has written a book entitled God is Back and if the Editor says so we had better take it seriously.
That book starts in China which probably has the most rapidly growing Christian community in the world. I paid my first visit to the Middle Kingdom exactly 30 years ago, carrying the bags for the Archbishop of Canterbury. I had my Olivetti portable with me and a supply of carbon paper so that I could draft speeches for the various stops along the way. The Cultural Revolution had only just run its course and the Christian communities we visited were understandably nervous. Now as President of the Bible Society I am just about to bid farewell to a delegation which will be going to China to celebrate the printing of the 100 millionth copy of the bible from the government controlled Amity Press – 60 million in Chinese and 40 million in other languages. The Chinese are the most significant bible publishers in the world and this is just one sign of the shift in the tectonic plates which has brought a multi-polar world into being.
At the same time, the prestige of our civilisation has been dented by the ever ramifying financial crisis. But the only narratives which seem to be available in public are a return to the normal of the day before yesterday after we have surmounted our short term economic difficulties or a doomsday scenario reminiscent of Malachi IV.
Christian hope is an approach to the future rather than an assessment. It is far removed from shallow optimism. I believe that we have received a wake-up call like the one which was put into the mouth of John the Baptist, the messenger, the forerunner who emerged from the wilderness to call for an about turn.
I believe that the ball is at our feet. The Christian community and the Church of England in particular could serve and make a contribution to creating a new narrative describing the truth of our present condition but containing seeds of hope capable of growing into a new and better normal.
But what is the agenda for repentance? There is an oecumenical agenda for repentance for things which developed in the 16th century at the beginning of the historical era which is passing. I shall briefly name three aspects of the agenda for repentance.
1. The over-definition of mystery in the interests of polemics. Matters of theological opinion were made into dogmas in the 16th century with the result that competing Christian absolutisms plunged our continent into a most destructive civil war. This explains the particular animus against the spiritual which characterised the subsequent scientific revolution and enlightenment.
2. The church was over bureaucratised and the elaboration of defensive bureaucracy continues. There is far too much law and regulation in the Church of England. Over-complexity has been the undoing of many previous cultures like Ming China in the 15th century.
3. Finally every part of the Church was complicit in the attempts of nation states and dynasties to consolidate their power and define their boundaries in the age of the cartographer.
Having identified some of the agenda for repentance from which we should be turning what of the agenda which will enable us to serve our times and God as we see him in Jesus Christ; God who so loved the world that he was generous and gave himself to us to draw us into his divine life.
1. A church should be a school of relating. The tradition of parish churches like this one that they exist for the whole community is crucially important. There are people buried in your graveyard who would never have described themselves as orthodox Christians. There should be a welcome for all but seriousness about an education in prayer and the conquest of anxiety and fear. This needs to be a place where we can be prepared to enter that state of equanimity where we can be sane and poised, no longer looking at ourselves but rejoicing in the freedom to love as God loves.
2. Second we should think Christian, think London; think Christian, think world – a true oecumenism and no longer that anxious insistence on boundaries and negotiations from behind our castle walls. There is a new communications order which is leading to the disintegration of old structures and the rapid appearance of self-assembling boundariless tribes. Wireless took years to reach an audience of millions. It took Face-book a matter of months. There are opportunities and dangers here but we shall have to get used to working in a new world.
3. Finally instead of associating with local powerful elites, our calling is to the whole world and our place is with the poor and vulnerable throughout the globe and it is also to befriend creation so scarred and wounded by our substitution of dominance for connectedness in our relations with the earth.
4.
The Holy Spirit of God will never leave himself without witnesses but there is no promise that a particular part of the church will not be relegated to the graveyard of failed experiments. As we enter this week which has its climax in the ordination in the Cathedral of another thirty deacons many of whom have made substantial sacrifices to offer themselves for the office and work of deacons in the Church of God, I am convinced that God has not finished with the Church of England and that we shall yet see in the words of the gospels that this is a place where the blind receive their sight and the lame walk; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them. Amen So be it.