I have a friend who is cultured, courteous and has a good sense of humour. However, he has an almost unique position of upholding Christianity (to some extent) whilst denying God, the Spirit or the supernatural. He seemed sympathetic to my being a priest, but he could not tolerate anything that would deny ordination for women, pastoral welcome to LGBT people. I think he draws the line at transsexualism, but I am unsure. Am I being intolerant at being totally confused with a conviction I have not encountered.

In fact I have encountered it in my old Vicar from Kendal Parish Church. He was honest and resigned his post to devoting his life to his interests, his family and nature. It is something people from our part of the country do, whether it is hiking on the mountains or sailing or rowing on the lakes.

The Church Times wrote in his obituary:

Until he embraced atheism, John Hodgkinson, who died on 11 June, aged 91, was an outstanding Vicar of Kendal for 19 years. He had been swimming in the Sea of Faith movement and had concluded that the Church was mistaken to interpret the resurrection as implying a life after death. He thought that the idea of heaven was a distraction from seeing transcendence in the real world. (Though he enjoyed the writings of Richard Holloway, he considered him to be not a proper atheist).

No longer able in conscience to recite the Creed, at the age of 62 he took early retirement into the barn-conversion home he had built with his own hands. Relieved of the burden of official subscription to what he considered the unnecessary add-ons of the Creed, he remained a willing celebrant at weekday eucharists and a much-appreciated occupant of rural pulpits, preaching only what he honestly believed. He was always a much-loved pastor and, in spite of or perhaps because of his doubts, was often invited to conduct humanitarian funerals. He took his last funeral only a few months ago.

We his faithful and choir members (I sung there under William Snowley from 1975-76 and had organ lessons with him), loved John Hodgkinson and esteemed his love of nature and his skill at making musical instruments in his home workshop. Above all, this was a man of integrity and complete honesty. What went wrong with his faith in God? We have truly to go back to our theology. What or who is God? One thing of which I am sure if that materialism is too grim and bleak to consider as “all there is”! I cannot be so simplistic as to judge and condemn – but it is a terrifying mystery why someone would deny God. Perhaps it is a case of:

I don’t believe in the god you don’t believe in.

Would he have believed in God with a different understanding? At the same time, the venerable Canon had studied theology and the Scriptures at Cambridge University. What came out in the obituary is that he was a part of the Sea of Faith movement, something considered as quite eccentric, but sharing in the general tone of secularising Modernism and the demythologising promoted by some German Lutheran theologians in the nineteenth century. I suspect that my friend had come into contact with this or a similar movement during his student days, or something like that.

What was the point of Jesus Christ if there is no God? Was he a social justice warrior or a political activist against the Roman occupation and hypocritical Judaism equally? Could we transpose this notion to the present times and use “spare parts” of scrapped Christianity to persuade Christians to become Marxist materialists? That seems to be what Liberation Theology is all about, oversimplifying it. It is certainly subject of current concern with the Woke and BLM movements and the extension of these claims to other minority groups.

So, how can someone claim to be Christian and atheist? I have been grappling with this one for a long time, as I have read authors like Stephan Höller, Elain Pagels and some integral traditionalist authors like René Guénon about Gnosticism. Gnosticism (there are orthodox versions like Origen and St Clement of Alexandria) classically makes a distinction between the Demiurge or Yaldabaoth and the God above God, the ultimate divine principle. The real issue is the problem of evil. How do we reconcile the cruelty of the Old Testament God and the spiritual nobility of Christ. Many have attempted to delve into this terrifying mystery. I think of Jakob Böhme the German cobbler who was detested by his local Lutheran pastor, and had such influence on men like Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Novalis and Nicholas Berdyaev.

He agreed with mainstream Christianity about the Fall, and that there were fallen angels, and that God was set to restore the world to a state of grace. However, he rejected the Lutheran teaching on justification by faith alone, and had an alternative explanation, closer to Catholicism. Not did he not claim that God sees evil as desirable, necessary or as part of divine will to bring forth good. Evil was necessary for man to reach God, almost as the later thesis-antithesis-synthesis of Hegel. What is clear is that this mystery of evil is beyond any of us. We can either find an acceptable way of understanding it partially through theology and philosophy – or we say that God is a load of bunk, a mere symbol created by the human mind.

On the other hand, Christ shows a spirit of goodness, kindness and refusal to judge. We are particularly moved by the Sermon on the Mount. However, how do we understand the miracles? Healing from sickness and spiritual trouble or diabolical possession. Do we just take the bits we like and spit out the rest?

Our modern “culture” rejects the supernatural and the spiritual, and all that remains is a minority of “cultural Christians” – who go to church but only for the social aspect.

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I began to write this article on 3rd March, and became quite distracted. I was set back on the rails by a discussion with some gentlemen who advocate the “rewilding” of Christianity. This term would seem to mean the continuing of some spiritual form of Christianity without the institutional churches (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, etc.). This is a tendency we will find from about the time of World War II with figures like Simone Weil and Dietrich Bonhöffer among others. We find ourselves at a branch-off movement between “free” spirituality and living according to Christian moral principles without belief, prayer or belonging to the institutional church.

I should mention the extraordinary personality of Simone Weil who is described in The Year of Our Lord 1943, Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs. The Allies and the Soviets defeated Hitler’s evil regime, but would the victors continue their life with more moral virtue and nobility of spirit? Darkness was beaten by blood and tears, but in 1943 darkness still covered Europe and most of the world. This book makes previously unseen connections between the ideas of five major Christian intellectuals in WWII — T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, Simone Weil, and Jacques Maritain. Society had to be based on an authentic spiritual life without need for force or fear to keep order.

The French Jewish philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909 – 1943) died very young. She is often called “a kindred spirit for church outsiders”. The point I make is that too many people get complexed about what they do in church, as if it mattered to other people or the collectivity. I have known holy and silent souls who just evaporated away after having sown the seeds, allowing others to reap the harvest. Many such souls will not be seen or noticed in church, but it doesn’t mean they are atheists or bad people. If we can comprehend such an idea, maybe the experience of institutional churches and liturgy will be that much more authentic and a source of grace. We might judge Weil for not accepting Baptism, but in her view of the Church, there was another way to Christ. I say this as a priest, horrified by the example of too many churchgoers.

The institutional church has been exhausted for a long time, and attempts to found alternative institutional churches eventually leads to the same impasse. The “wild” church idea seems to be an appealing message. What is a “wild church”? A family? A group of friends? What? An agreement to found such a thing would involve some measure of institutionalism. On reading different opinions on the subject here and there, the essential message seems little different from various strands of early Protestantism and the rejection of priesthood or clerical structures, except the various boards of “elders” who would become a new clerical caste in time. Perhaps those who are attracted to such a vision could simply join the Quakers. I have a great deal of respect for the Quakers, and they seem to represent the notion of a community without the problems of an institutional church and with an aura of sincerity and firm principles.

My best experience of Catholicism has been spending time with old country parish priests in France and who resisted the post Vatican II changes. It was a form of the traditionalist reaction, but less radical and more rooted in the place where the parish was situated. Sooner or later, such parishes came to an end with the mortality of the ageing priests. I joined the Institute of Christ the King after my university days in Switzerland and encountered the spirit of the founders, not so much Msgr Wach and Fr Mora who were ordained in Italy under the aegis of Cardinal Siri of Genoa, but the old French parish priests of Opus Sacerdotale. This association still exists and I am happy to see that it has a website. I don’t think that spirit of simplicity went very far in the Institute as it went the way of the old chapters of secular canons. Those little French parishes seemed to me to embody some degree of “wildness” but within essential canonical boundaries all in resisting anti-traditional authoritarianism.

It was quite a number of years ago that I looked at the idea of the intentional community after the example of Eric Gill and Ditchling. I am sure there are some very good and democratic communities, just as there are collectivist, communist and sectarian communities. It seems to be a domain where certain contemporary Marxist-inspired ideologies can take hold. They certainly need to be visited and acquaintances made with people. I remember a conversation with a Benedictine abbot who admitted to me that monastic life is totalitarian and collective, a form of communism – though opposed to Marxism as a philosophical system and theory. The thought is sobering and the alternative is living alone. How far must self-sacrifice go?

“Wild” Christianity is given the analogy of a biological organism, generally a plant or a tree. The seed is sown in the ground, which then germinates into a plant with roots, a stem and leaves, then with a reproductive system, generally flowers with insects as the vectors of pollination. For a “wild” Christian community, must the idea come from a single person or a group? How do we distinguish the good leader from the narcissist lusting after power, money and control? There are spiritual communities, both Christian and following other religions and ideas, and each has to be assessed on its own merit. There are many others also outside the UK. Some are almost “lay monasteries” and others are less structured.

* * *

After this little excursus on “alternative” Christianities, I set out to criticise this idea of Christian atheism. It is not a monolithic movement, but rather a tendency with different strands and variations. A good introductory article is Christian Atheism. The article ends with a quote from C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity objecting to the claim that Jesus was merely a moral guide:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

The apologist is treading on brittle ground, and often suggests triumphalism and an attitude that suggests “ownership” of truth. Any apologetic argument can be circumvented, in particular by claiming that the choices on offer are not the only ones. I appreciate Lewis like the other scholars in the 1920’s and 30’s who represented a kind of neo-Romantic movement.

Christian Atheism is a formidable foe. The notion is quite depressing, but reveals many fault lines in traditional teachings about God. For many of us, the notion of a dictator who rewards and punishes like a Judge & Jury or an old-fashioned school headmaster with his well-worn cane no longer holds authority. Some Gnostic views suggest a God who is beyond human imagination other than being the transcendence that lives in us all and in whom we participate with love. Plato’s metaphysics give more of an understanding than fundamentalist “biblicism”. Josef Ratzinger was insistant on the role of philosophy and the role of reason to give credibility to Revelation. Faith and Reason must cohabit.

The thought of life without spirit is too bitter and depressing to contemplate, leaving only brute materialism, itself without lasting credibility and leading to insanity. As we were taught in university, morality and ethics are a consequence of spirituality and love. We may be swimming in the sea after the ship of the institutional church has sunk. We may be struggling and experiencing solitude, being on the outside and without roots. God is understood in many different ways, but they all give meaning to life.

The Jewish discovery that God is not a god but Creator is the discovery of absolute Mystery behind and underpinning reality. Those who share it (either in its Judaic or its Christian form) are not monotheists who have reduced the number of gods to one. They, we, have abolished the gods; there is only the Mystery sustaining all that is. The Mystery is unfathomable, but it is not remote as the gods are remote. The gods live somewhere else, on Olympus or above the starry sky. The Mystery is everywhere and always, in every grain of sand and every flash of colour, every hint of flavour in a wine, keeping all these things in existence every microsecond. We could not literally approach God or get nearer to God for God is already nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is the ultimate depth of our beings making us to be ourselves. – Herbert McCabe