All Saints Parish Paper 7, MARGARET STREET, LONDON W1W 8JG JANUARY 2015 £1.00

All Saints Parish Paper 7, MARGARET STREET, LONDON W1W 8JG www.allsaintsmargaretstreet.co.uk JANUARY 2015 £1.00 VICAR’S LETTER At Christmas we celebrate the Word made flesh, God the Son born as Mary’s child. Scripture and liturgy, carol and anthem, crib and nativity play, help us meditate on the reality of the divine becoming human and the human being taken into the divine. The incarnation demonstrates to us the value which God places on humankind, that he bound us to himself for ever. So it also shows the value which we should also place on human life from beginning to end, cradle to grave. In the week I am writing this, Hampden Gurney School will stage its nativity plays and the next day Fr Bowie and I assist Fr Beauchamp with the school Mass, something I do most weeks. People often say that “Christmas is for the children”. Fr Alan beside one of the new iron There is a suggestion that this means it chandeliers (Photo: Andrew Prior) isn’t really for adults and that they are a bit embarrassed by singing “Away in a infantilise us, but because the pride which manger” and the like. It is childish rather elevates one human being over another than mature — something which we should demeans the dignity of fellow human grow out of unless we are to remain stuck beings and children of God, made in the in childhood. And yet, there is a wonder divine image. The humility of the Wise Men in it which can light up the darkness of kneeling before the infant Jesus reminds us December and the winter of our cynicism, that humility before God and others is an despair and self-absorption. essential to being truly human, even for the cleverest of us. Jesus tells us that unless we become like little children we cannot enter the kingdom So the God who created humankind and of heaven; not because he wanted to then united it with his own life, could be 1 said to be the original humanist. And yet, the Maritain and the Anglican Michael term “humanism” is now associated with Ramsey. Archbishop Ramsey wrote, in rejection of religious belief. It has come the late 1960s, that ‘Europe knew a long to mean those who see humankind only in tradition of avowedly Christian humanism terms of itself rather than in relationship drawn from the confluence of the stream with something greater. God has come to of biblical theism from Palestine and be seen as a projection of the human, made the stream of classical humanism from in our image, rather than the Creator who ancient Greece’. In the same essay he made humankind in his. invited Christians to rediscover that tradition, confident that “no truth is to The Christmas market usually produces a be feared since all truth is of God”. book or two attacking or questioning religion in general or Christianity in particular. But The Church may have ‘Christianised’ this year, just in time for Christmas, has pagan festivals like Christmas in its come a defence of Christian humanism and evangelisation of the ancient world, but it an argument that humanism is deeply rooted was also able to recognise what was good in in Christianity as well as in the culture of the thought of that world; what reflected the classical Greece which the Church happily divine reason which became flesh in Jesus took over, and not just in a modern secular Christ. science-based culture. Its authors are Canon Ritchie and Spencer recognise that the Angus Ritchie, of the Centre for Theology gulf between Christianity and humanism and Community, based at St George’s in which has developed over the last couple the East, (he preached for us at Corpus of centuries is not just the product of its Christi this year) and Nick Spencer of the co-option by an aggressive atheism and Theos religious think-tank which is based in scientism, Christians who have asked what Westminster. Jerusalem can have to do with Athens. Those In his foreword to “The Case for who have reacted to attacks on traditional Christian Humanism,” the former understandings of faith on the grounds of Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan human “reason” by stressing the claims of Williams writes: faith to the virtual exclusion of reason, have played a rôle in this divorce too. ‘Christians believe that what they speak of and try to live by is a truth that As well as defending the religious and brings ‘abundance’ to human life: “I have Christian roots of humanism, seen not come that they may have life, and just in patristic and mediæval times but in have it to the full” (John 10: 10). That the Renaissance and the development of is the charter for speaking of a Christian science, Ritchie and Spencer acknowledge ‘humanism’, a tradition that goes right that humanists, religious and non-religious, back to the days of earliest Christianity, share much in common. But they argue that a where we find the second century writer humanism which is cut off from its religious Irenaeus of Lyons saying that “the glory roots, without a sense of something greater, of God is a human being fully alive”, is itself at peril in a world where many are and is echoed by some of the great hostile to its values. Christian minds of the twentieth century such as the Roman Catholic Jacques Engaging with modern humanism’s 2 definition of itself and its values, they argue God’s own being and, at the same time, a the need for the religious dimension if these critically important sense of the limitations values are to endure. Humanism sees the of reason, of human fallibility and our dignity of each human being in our capacity capacity to act irrationally. The Fall may be to reason, but this risks limiting “the range written off as mythology and the doctrine of people who can be said to possess this of Original Sin derided as pessimistic, but inherent dignity. Arguments that ground our they help provide a more realistic view dignity as humans in our capacities exclude of humankind than the myth of human those human beings who either have never perfectibility. possessed such rationality, or who have lost it (for example through degenerative Atheist humanists make much of Darwin, conditions) and have no chance to acquire but we do not need fundamentalists to it again. Indeed, by some reckonings, it question whether Darwin’s theory answers even leaves out infants… Wherever one all questions about human life. draws the line, the fact is that when built on “…if evolution by natural selection is the these foundations, human dignity becomes only thing providing any kind of purpose relative not absolute.” Christianity teaches or direction to the development of our us that we are all God’s children, regardless capacities, then our ability to reason has of our intellectual abilities. The child with only been placed in us because it helps us to Downs Syndrome is of equal worth to survive and multiply. Our reason is therefore someone with a science doctorate. directed to survival not truth. But we know that human reason does help us to find the Christians and humanists both look to truth as well as to survive.” human reason for help in determining what is ethical. Ritchie and Spencer argue that the To return to the Christmas story, if the problem for “humanists” is how to explain survival of the fittest is what reason is for, our capacity for discerning objective moral then Herod was acting perfectly reasonably truths — ones not limited to the culture of a in massacring the Innocents if they might particular time and place, or our individual threaten his survival. In our own time, the preferences and convenience. “…an use of de-humanising torture to obtain ethical system based on a wholly material information from those suspected of being understanding of the universe, in which security threats also becomes perfectly evolution is the only real engine, has great reasonable. But when this is carried out by difficulty in asserting that something is the agents of a country which prides itself objectively good.” on its origins in both Christianity and the Age of Reason, we sense that something Anti-religious humanists see atheism has gone far wrong. When brutal abuse as founded in reason, while religion is is hidden by abuses of language like superstitious and irrational. Ritchie and “enhanced interrogation techniques,” we Spencer argue that the opposite is true. sense that even those responsible know “Atheism cannot explain why human reason that they are doing something which deeply should be trusted.” offends against the ideals of the society they Historic Christianity has both a high view claim to defend. It is not only the victims of of reason as a gift of God and a reflection of this behaviour who are de-humanised by it, 3 or even just the perpetrators of it, but all of three Sundays and Benediction also took us in whose name it was done. place there. That we have been able to do this with the minimum of fuss is testimony So our celebration of the Word, the to a depth of devotion and understanding of divine reason, made flesh, is not just a nice what we are doing when we worship which story for children, but a vital story for all means that we are not upset by temporary humankind, for we are all the children of changes. God — however grown-up we might think we are — and whether we believe or not.

Load more