How To Be An Agnostic

Bad Faith

world. Only the most militant atheists can think otherwise at the
start of the twenty-fi rst century. Even in relatively secular coun-
tries like the UK, where few people go to church, many, perhaps
a majority, still want the church to be part of the fabric of their
lives. When I was a priest, relatively few in the parish came to
church Sunday by Sunday, but over the course of three years, I
reckoned to have had direct contact with about half the people
in it, as a result of baptisms, weddings and funerals. That’s pretty
good going for any organisation in our fragmented world.

The theist’s God

However, if science has not forced out belief, it has forced
Christianity to evolve: in the logos-centric world, it is compelled
to speak the language of fact and application and be overly wary
of myth. This, I suspect, is the underlying reason that religious
services are now dominated by doctrinal statements about God.
Doctrine is religion ‘as fact’; it is religion ‘applied’. Transformed
in this way, it tries to fulfi l the two main criteria required by
science: the need to deliver certainty and the need to deliver
relevance. What tends to be lost is that crucial element in the
spiritual life, that which is part of us but also beyond us.
Think of the ramifi cations of this for the doctrine of the
Trinity. It originated in the era of myth, the fourth century,
when, as Karen Armstrong continues, it was quite natural for
Gregory, the fourth-century CE bishop of Nyssa, to explain that:

Father, Son and Spirit were not objective, ontological facts,

but simply ‘terms that we use’ to express the way in which

the ‘unnameable and unspeakable’ divine nature adapts itself

to the limitations of our human minds. You could not prove

the existence of the Trinity by rational means. It was no more

demonstrable than the elusive meaning of music or poetry.

However, since the sixteenth century, this cannot but help
sound like a cop-out; it sounds like the theologian is avoiding