Over Christmas, on Professor Brian Cox’s BBC Radio 4 witty scientific
panel show, The Infinite Monkey Cage,
the Anglican Bishop of Leeds, Nicholas Baines, was asked what the Church of
England’s official position was on Christmas ghost stories, and the existence
and positive or negative influence of ghosts. He redirected the question from
what the Church’s settled position might be to the way Christian theology
discusses it instead. He made the good
point that Christians attest to reality beyond what can simply be measured or
what you can see. The work of scientists, he said, seeks answers to “What?” and
“How?”; but theology helps science by addressing questions of meaning: “Why?” Thus,
on ghosts, he began to say that the Church takes seriously that there is a huge
dimension beyond what is merely physical, but corrected himself to say instead
that it is Christian theology that takes this seriously.
While the bishop made a good and serious theological point
in the midst of a fascinating but light-touch programme for the public
awareness of science, it was striking that twice he declined to say, “The
Church’s position is…” or “The Church teaches…” The reluctance to “give an
account of the hope that lies within you” (1 Peter 3.15), which St Peter goes on to
explain is through the resurrection of Christ who has gone into heaven where
the spiritual powers are subject to him, seems to be a symptom not of timidity
when it comes to declaring and discussing faith, but of presenting it as a
matter of ideas and intuitions without their grounding in the concrete events
experienced 2,000 years ago. Thus religion concerns matters of personal
spiritual dispositions, rather than the certain explanation about how reality
stands, in the light of Christ: “it’s all relative”, rather than “it’s all
revealed”. For it matters to the
Christian faith, not whether it can provide human beings with a sense of
meaning that appears reasonable in the twenty-first century over two millennia
since Jesus was born, but whether the events and the Person that the disciples
have consistently borne witness ever since rings true because that is how
things were, and thus are. It comes down not speculation on the “non-physical
dimension”, but to whether Jesus Christ rose from the dead and appeared in a new
life to many witnesses. St Paul explains that the physical body of the
crucified Christ, and that he himself met, had been “sown natural” but “raised
spiritual” (I Corinthians 15.44). The flesh which Jesus took from Mary had clothed
God himself; and now the “huge dimension beyond” clothes us in turn. It is no
longer outside our physical world, because our natural life stands within the
order of the spiritual. They are no
longer estranged, but reconciled. The kingdom of God is penetrating; it comes
on earth as it is in heaven
As for “Are there ghosts?”, our older language answers that
we concern ourselves with the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life who
renders all things subject to the rule of Christ and thus the attractive force
of love. “Do the dead survive for life after death?” The question is the wrong
way round: now that we have seen the resurrection and ascension of humanity
taken from Mary, the question is “Where is this life leading? From where do we
start in order to arrive at it?” C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce portrayed the living as the shadows who haunt the
earth, finally getting on a bus that goes journeys on and on, round and round,
until people are able to step off and tread on the harder, firmer reality of
heaven that they are not otherwise ready to endure. As always, the great
questions of religious belief, that Christ answers, are not about whether we
deign to “take seriously the huge dimension beyond”, but whether “the huge
dimension beyond” takes us seriously, reveals itself as none other than The
Person par excellence, taking birth in our flesh, sowing it natural, raising it
spiritual, and showing us that the holy, the divine, the realm and sphere of
heaven, and the principle of God’s person-driven Love on which the entire universe
is powered are “not hereafter”, but here and penetrating through us now.
The beliefs that Mary Mother of God was conceived
immaculate, by the grace of Christ’s redemption, and that she was assumed
physically into heaven (“sown natural, raised spiritual”) were defined as dogma
– the settled view taught by the Catholic Church – in order to protect the
fundamental faith of Christianity that (a) there is one Redeemer and without
him no religious faith or enlightened reasoning ultimately avails; and that (b)
this salvation, like our creation and death and destiny in that “huge dimension
beyond”, is worked out by God in our flesh and in no other way. In September
2016, at a brilliant lecture, as usual, by Archbishop Rowan Williams, Master of
Magdalene College, Cambridge, to mark the legacy of the Malines Conversations
at the church of St Mary, Bourne Street in London (where the leading Anglican
figure, Lord Halifax, had been churchwarden), he said that, while the Catholic
Church had been accused of adding to the core of faith by imposing the
necessity of these dogmas in the past, in its negative response to contemporary
realisations about humanity that the Anglican Communion was, with difficulty,
tackling – for instance he specified the extension of the Anglican priesthood
to include both men and women, but what he said could apply to bio-ethics, the
nature of marriage, and the indissolubility of sacramental marriage – he told
Benedict XVI that the Catholic Church was now subtracting from the apostolic faith
as it was authentically developing, narrowing it.
Presumably they engaged each other in a discussion of
Newman’s theory of the development of Christian doctrine. Doubtless Pope
Benedict remained unmoved by an argument against the See of Rome’s consistent
bias against addition and innovation and in favour of the handing on -
purifying and clarifying as necessary - and applying in the now the faith the
apostles came to then, the consequences that follow from that, and nothing more
nor less.
Two of the best and most thoughtful communicators among the
Church of England’s bishops have thus reflected on what the Church doesn’t so
much teach as discuss, as well as what the Church ought to teach, less
“narrowly”. The contribution of the Catholic Church in this conversation is
that there is a hierarchy in the truth, and that giving priority to the current
- even pressing - concerns of the natural order upturns the position that the
physical world in which we live has its context and true meaning that comes only
from the direction of the spiritual. So, the priority belongs to God revealed
in Christ, who in turn reveals us as we are truly to be. Furthermore, even in the
layers of the hierarchy of truths, a lesser truth is not less true and a greater
truth is not “more” true. The truth is one, and truth is not relative but
binding.
I wish to all members of the Catholic League, who hold to
this truth about God, and about ourselves, the creation and our place in it, redeemed
for the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, a truly hopeful and
inspired 2017. We begin it with the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in which
we make Our Lord’s prayer our own, “Father, may they be one, as we are one,
completely, so that the world may know that you have sent me.” And it is vivid
that Christ produces this prayer out of another – that we following Christ in
turn may be made holy by the truth of his Word, not ours (John 17). Christ
founded but one Church, not divided denominations, and, as Metropolitan Platon
of Kiev (1803-1891) said, “the walls of separation do not rise as far as
heaven”. Let us pray that the sovereign unity of the Trinity, from which the
Church receives its own unity, may penetrate from heaven the Church of
Christians on earth. And, the Spirit making us holy, may we see “the unity of
all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ” (Fr Paul Couturier, 1881-1952,
re-founder of the Week of Prayer, Apostle of Unity). MW
