By John Cole

The story of the twentieth century has been the story of the sinking of the good ship ‘Christendom’. The disastrous experience of two world wars holed it below the waterline and it finally sank around the 1960s. As the stormy seas raged, so gathered churches have tried to behave like islands of stability - when they should have been ‘ships of salvation’ - and too much effort has gone into retrieving treasures from the wreckage or harking back to the times when the passengers enjoyed silver service from officers in gold braid.

To change the metaphor, the tide which has stranded the parish system - is a tide not just of social change but of our entire patterns of thinking.

In mediaeval times religion was part of the web of life. Everyone lived in a ‘sacral’ or cultic’ community. When King Henry arranged for Thomas à Becket to be murdered, this was not a conflict between Church and State, for Church and State were essentially one and the same thing. Almost everyone accepted this feudal and religious authority as being part of a natural order given by God.

Three things began to change all this:

All three movements led to a new independence of mind and a new spirit of questioning. God, people had discovered, is a God of Reason.

What was beginning to happen is what is now known as ‘secularisation’. This did not simply mean that people began to claim that some parts of life were ‘secular’, as though they had nothing to do with God; but that these areas of life were no longer religiously or cultically ‘tied’.

Probably the classic definition of secularisation comes from the German theologian, Gogarten: ‘’Secularisation is when human existence comes to be determined by the dimension of time and history".

In other words secularisation is when people protest against a way of thinking - which lingers still from the middle ages - by which people see their human condition as static, set up permanently within a pyramid of order and authority, with God as the ultimate dominating, authorising, divinising keystone to the structure. Secularisation challenges the view of life whereby people accept the future as fate and not as part of a process from ‘then’ through ‘now‘.

In these terms the Old Testament must be one of the most secularised set of books ever written. Yet how few church people realise it! Throughout the Old Testament the message is one of constant rejection of the dominating gods of the nations and an assertion that God has a covenant relationship with his chosen people made valid by significant history and promises for the future.

Despite this, churches of all denominations have been slow to recognise what has been happening, slow to see how the Holy Spirit has been fostering this great tide of thought.

Instead, by drawing people into gathered congregations or by organising them under hierarchies, churches have been providing themselves with an artificial setting in which the sacral domination can continue, where people can continue to be enslaved to their religion as if to the gods of the nations.

This at least partly explains why many local congregations find modern theological thinking so difficult. It is not because the arguments are too abstruse but because they are too disturbing.

For in a gathered or a hierarchical church the man or woman in the pew can easily end up more out of touch with contemporary secular ways of thinking than the theologian. A church which tries in effect to pretend that secularisation has not happened will almost inevitably be driven to cling to fossilised forms of theology.

In extreme cases the result is what is called ‘Revelation Positivism’ - the line of thought which says ‘’Because it is in the Bible ...’’ OR "Because the Church teaches it, it must be true.’’

But even in its mildest form this disease has the effect of making it difficult for church members to cope with change and inhibiting them from thinking imaginatively or maturing as Christian disciples.

All this is sad, for the Holy Spirit has surely been at work in this ‘secularising’ tide of thought, helping us to see that God is greater than the dogmas we propound and equipping us to come to terms with the new more fluid urban society which has been evolving at the same time.

The most important lesson to come out of secularisation is that we are all part of our history, not above it. So the fundamental question is no longer the one asked in the middle ages by St Thomas Aquinas - that of ‘faith seeking an explanation’ (fides quaerens intellectum). People’s concern, as is obvious from debates about the environment, is now directed towards the future, not simply towards explanations of the here and now.

Today’s quest is ‘spes quaerens intellectum’: "Is there any reason why we should hope any more?’’

A church which can offer a positive answer to this question will not be a church which clings to outdated structures or offers cosy escape routes from the world. Instead it will be a pilgrim church, a church searching for fulfilment for the whole of God’s creation within the City of God.