Giving reasons for the hope that is within us

There can by now be little doubt that secularist culture is sailing into uncharted and shark-infested waters, with extreme self-confidence but heralding a possible ‘culture of death’, to use the telling phrase of the last Bishop of Rome. And therefore it is the case that the churches owe it to the nation not to give up on the Christian message as a powerful, life-giving, true and good basis for social and political morality. If the churches do not believe that their Gospel is a universal truth claim, that Christ is the perfection of human living, then why should others take it seriously?

The real danger is that our church ruling councils are opting for the politically driven, indeed secularist, idea that Christianity is for a certain cultural grouping only and that to announce it outside that grouping is offensive and likely to stir up trouble. The New Testament realises that the Gospel is indeed foolishness to the Greeks and a scandal to the Jews, in its claim that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’, absorbing the horror of human sin himself and remaking humanity in Jesus.

That is a universal claim. The Apostles preached to the Jews and Gentiles, men and the (then very second class) women, free and slaves, the cross broke down sectarian and cultural barriers, even the outcasts, the lepers, the unclean, all the world’s people were the intended beneficiaries of divine grace. And this grace gradually rehumanised cultures and political power.
The churches are charged with the responsibility of commending this Gospel in Christlike fashion, in love alone, to all.

At parish level this is going on all the time through the efforts of clergy and laity, the great and the apparently insignificant, telling out the mercy of God in Christ. As we hear that atheists are to set up anti-God children’s camps, we ask where is the intellectual case for the universal Gospel being made? We have a brilliant intellect in our Archbishop of Canterbury, who has engaged with the arch atheist Philip Pullman among others: but we need a reasoned reaffirmation of the Christian basic claim, as made for example by Archbishop Ramsey and, before him, Temple. We do have the gift of brilliant scientist believers, John Polkinghorne, for example, showing the deep compatibility of science and faith. Keith Ward’s recent book ‘Why there almost certainly is a God’ is excellent. But the whole moral and spiritual ethos of the Gospel, focused on the dying and rising Jesus and not some general religiosity, needs to be given to ordinary people in a reasonable way.

CS Lewis of course was the extraordinarily powerful Christian apologist of the mid-20th century, in philosophical and literary modes, evoking Pullman’s counter polemic today. Each generation needs its own Christian voice to articulate the cogency and attractiveness of Jesus’ way and teaching about human life. We need faithful, imaginative and reasoned voices now, urgently.