My new book

/Users/theohobson/Desktop/IMG_0614.MOV

Here is a very brief video about my new book, Reinventing Liberal Christianity

Crown of Thorns

Crown of Thorns

I made this Crown of Thorns for Holy Week. It’s made of old hose-pipes/cables. Liberal Christians need to show some passion blood, to show they mean it.

Liberal Christianity

 

This is a taster of a forthcoming article in Third Way magazine.

What’s wrong with liberal Christianity? It has, for at least a generation, been firmly associated with wetness, weakness. On one hand it is accused of diluting traditional Christian teaching with secular humanist assumptions; on the other it is charged with lacking the courage of its convictions, and being too nice to stand up to rival forms of religion and offer a coherent alternative to them. The normal liberal Christian response, of course, is to deny the charges: we do believe in Jesus Christ, and we do dare to stand up for what we believe. Of course the response has some validity, but not enough.

 

It is wiser to plead guilty – a bit like when the Conservatives once admitted to being the nasty party. Yes, we must say – liberal Christianity has a huge problem! It does indeed veer towards mushy secular humanism and semi-agnosticism – we admit it. And it does indeed lack the confidence of other Christian traditions; it seems almost to agree that conservatives are probably the real Christians, and that we liberals are just dubious newfangled reformist types.

 

Can this change? Can liberal Christianity tighten up and toughen up? I suggest that it is possible, but that it is difficult. It is tempting to ‘reform’ this tradition in a way that seems to strengthen it but actually perpetuates its weakness. 

In recent decades, liberal Protestant theology has been out of fashion. Of course it lives on in practical terms, in the movements for the ordination of women and of homosexuals – and also in religious campaigns for social justice. These are valid causes, but they risk repeating the errors of liberal Christianity, by seeming to put all the emphasis on equal rights, secular progress. These concerns must be rooted in a coherent account of liberal Christianity, free of bad old humanist habits. We should admit that left-liberal political activism carries a danger; it threatens to dominate our image, for it is tempting to locate our relevance, radicalism and authenticity here. 

Baptism

This week the last of my three children is being baptized. Well that’s three souls saved then.

 

I’ve wrestled with this: I find baptism hard to make sense of. It’s the main Christian ritual action, or ‘sacrament’, alongside the Eucharist, but it seems full of problems. Of course the problems are clearer with infant, or child, baptism. What does it mean to initiate a child into a religion that he or she is not freely choosing? Shouldn’t the child decide for herself when she’s older? And there’s a Christian objection too: doesn’t it suggest that religious identity is just a matter of social tradition, rather than serious adult decision? Isn’t it a relic of a previous Christian era? It might please the grandparents and be an excuse for a party, but doesn’t it misrepresent the nature of Christianity today?

 

I was baptized, or ‘christened’ as a baby. It was a middle-class social ritual as well as a religious one – it was the sort of thing that my sort of family did. I was assigned godparents who had no especial interest in religion. About thirteen years later I was ‘confirmed’ – after which I started receiving the bread and wine at church. (It’s now more common to let children take full part in the communion, so confirmation has become pretty redundant.) Of course, as a young teenager I was still going with the flow of family expectations to a large extent, rather than making a fully free decision. But when does a free decision become possible? The Christian churches that delay baptism until young adulthood involve an unhelpful pretence that at some arbitrary age a spotty youth is suddenly capable of authentic faith, maybe even of being ‘saved’, or ‘born again’, God help us.

 

But on the other hand infant baptism also carries a lot of dubious baggage. The practice is haunted by the centuries of Christianity’s cultural domination, when people were effectively obliged to sign up their infants to the orthodox faith. And even after theocracy was effectively dead, it remained the ‘thing to do’, and in some circles still does. When my first child was born, I had a few qualms, but not enough to keep us from the font. But I was a bit uneasy about the event; it felt as if middle-class convention was pulling the strings. With the next child, I held back – I wanted to become a bit clearer about the meaning of baptism, about what we thought we were doing. The key issue was that I was feeling very critical of institutional church at that time, and baptism strongly identifies Christian identity with institutional allegiance. I gradually came round to the necessity of institutional church – so the boy was baptized last year. It’s his sister’s turn on Sunday.

 

So what does the ritual mean? Even though I now affirm it, I still find it hard to say. It’s obviously about a person joining the church, or Christian culture, moving from outsider to insider. The complication is that this move is presented in the strongest possible symbolic terms; it is associated with the transition of salvation itself, the move from humanity’s normal sinful condition to new life in Christ. There’s even an echo of exorcism: Satan’s power over this soul is broken, we assert. Stirring stuff, but it doesn’t make much sense if applied literally to the child at the font, whose career in sin is just a twinkle in her eye. But – crucially – it doesn’t make theological sense if applied to an adult being baptized either, for Christians do not believe that a sinless state is possible, that there can be a neat transition from sinner to saint. So this is the odd thing about baptism: it seems to be about this particular soul’s salvation but this shouldn’t be understood too literally, too directly. It’s about salvation in general, in the abstract. It signifies that this person belongs to this tradition which speaks of a dramatic shift, or turn, from death to life, from hopeless subjection to demonic forces to salvation in Christ. In practice no human soul, of any age, can be neatly placed on the side of salvation. But all human souls, Christians believe, can be placed in its orbit.

TLS letter

I have a letter in this week’s TLS accusing of John Gray of ‘modish cant’, for knocking liberalism.

Sir,
John Gray suggests that there is a deep affinity between Communism and liberalism: both believe in progress, and so share ‘the hubris of modernity’ (Jan 4). This is modish cant. Liberalism might be defined as the belief that a certain sort of politics is preferable to tyranny and can keep it at bay (constitutionalism, respect for religious liberty and other related ‘rights’, democracy). You could call this a belief in progress, for it holds that we can progress beyond theocratic, autocratic, absolutist government. But to conflate this with the Communist dream of utopia is silly. Gray is so desirous to seem heroically undeceived by the consoling delusions of the rest of us that common sense goes out the window.
Theo Hobson