How To Be An Agnostic
great myths which inform their traditions have lost weight. Can
they speak to us still, my nervous Christian friends will ask.
For a while, after atheism, I thought I should keep a Wittgens-
teinian silence about these things; to ‘pass over in silence’. If my
journey had taught me anything, I reasoned, it was that some-
times to speak is only to reduce, possibly to ruin. But that did
not last for long. For there’s also the attempt to catch a glimpse.
It has also been said that some people are not musical when it
comes to religion. Well it became apparent to me that I was.
My imagination was rekindled and I began to enjoy the big
questions again. I could not pretend that centuries of spiritu-
ality should be discounted as the fl otsam and jetsam of more
primitive and superstitious times. I fi gured that while I didn’t
have a priestly vocation, I was ‘called’ – by circumstance, tem-
perament and curiosity at least – to engage with the perennial
human quest.
That said, I could not simply become a Christian again. My
scoffi ng at belief stopped but so had the appeal of belonging to a
church. This was partly a matter of being sensible: I grew to value
Christianity again, to value my links with it, but warily. I need a
certain distance. It was also a matter of being honest. The modern
Church requires you to adhere to a creed that is more substan-
tial than God is love: one should really be able to make a good
stab at believing that God is Father, God is incarnate in Christ,
God is in his Church and God is revealed in the Bible. Hand on
heart, straightforwardly, I could not and cannot. I can no longer
do the apologetics for the Christian tradition that the priest must
be able to do, though I do want to encounter the tradition they
conserve and represent. I remember hearing a comment made
by the British politician Tony Benn, on how he sides with the
prophets in the Hebrew Bible – the ones who say that God is in
the desert and the wandering – rather than the priests, who build
splendid but defensive temples. No doubt, prophets and priests
are both needed: we humans must dialogue with those who see
things differently to us because no single view will do. But I felt
clearer about my place in this discourse now.