Bad Faithrelevancy. ‘Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and
Saviour?’, ‘Are you born again?’, ‘What would Jesus do?’ – these
are the questions of a personal religion that must be seen to be
applicable to the modern, autonomous individual. Similarly,
courses on being a Christian at work, being a Christian at home,
marriage as a Christian, singleness as a Christian – these are the
self-help programmes that a church must run to be relevant. Or
again: this kind of Christianity conveys the idea that you can
talk to God as easily as you can call your mother. It is an idea
of prayer that is more or less absent in the spiritual traditions
of the past. Then prayer was perceived as entering a cloud of
unknowing or a dark night of the soul. Now, though, prayer is
the activity so entertainingly parodied in Wendy Cope’s poem,
from her collection Serious Concerns:
When I went out shopping,
I said a little prayer:
‘Jesus, help me park the car
For you are everywhere.’Even within more liberal churches, the logos is profoundly
shaping the nature of the church. Paul Fletcher’s book,
Disciplining the Divine, explains why from a historical perspec-
tive. He points out that one of the key tenets of the Reformation
was that the Bible should take precedent in matters of doctrine
and salvation, over the tradition and the church. Sola scriptura
was the slogan. Unless something can be proven in the Bible,
it cannot be taken as ‘gospel truth’. The element that the Bible
could provide, and that the diverse tradition and a corrupt
Church could not, was the new, post-Copernican need for fact,
decision and proof.
However, treating the Bible in this way is a risky strategy
because the Bible itself could be put under the microscope and
subjected to the rigours of scientifi c investigation – as, indeed,
it was – and as, indeed, it was found to be wanting. What then?
How might the integrity of the Bible as a source of authority be