Culture Clash...

I had a busy time last week, for a week off! On the Saturday I spent a day at the BeThinking National Apolgetics Conference. 6 hours of lectures from some of the world’s foremost Christian philosophers, scientists and Biblical scholars. The over-arching theme was responding to the challenge of the so called ‘New Atheism’ – the converging ideals that faith is intellectually incoherent, science provides a more adequate world-view and that religion in general, and Biblical Christianity in particular, is immoral.


Through the middle of the week I spent a few days up in the North East, with the lovely people of the Northumbria Community, in their new ‘Mother House’. Days spent in silence, quiet reflection, fresh air, contemplation.

On my return it wasn’t hard to see just how different these two experiences had been, not only physically, at opposite ends of the country, one in the midst of one of the busiest cities in the world, the other scarcely a dot in a sea of white on my ‘Googlemaps’ printout, but also intellectually, emotionally … spiritually.

They were both Christian events, each stretched and enhanced my own faith, yet, I reflected, it is a strange faith that is engaged in two such disparate ways … and a million more in between. I felt, as I often do, a little schizophrenic. Naturally, I like to think of myself as quite the contemplative, I’m not scared of silence, am happy in my own company and if there’s a thought provoking visual image and a few Tea lights around then so much the better! I still want to ask the difficult questions though. My hackles are raised when it’s suggested I park my brain in some corner or, worse still, listen to some crude anti-intellectualism that sometimes passes for Christian commentary. These distinctions might be classified in many different ways; scientific versus artistic, activist versus reflective, right brain versus left brain or, perhaps most common of all, modern versus post-modern.

I guess I am a child of my time, born in the mid 60’s growing up in the ‘culture wars’ of the late 20th century, I am one of the first, now aging, ‘post-moderns’. But wait, can we just shrug our shoulders and leave it at that? Can Christian faith really have it both ways in the emerging cultural climate of the 21st century? Philosopher William Lane Craig, in the BeThinking conference, was straightforward and scathing. So called Post-Modernism, he claimed, was a sham, worse still, an intellectual deceit, employed by the enemies of faith, in order to disarm theists of their rational defences and claim for themselves exclusive rights over all the keys areas of public discourse. Leave subjectivity to the artists, he seemed to suggest, no-one denies the objective meaning of the text when reading the instructions on a packet of rat poison!

In Northumbria an entirely different agenda was in play. No questions here around historical accuracy or objective truth, talk instead of journey, connection, encircling and encounter. One of the community’s leaders, Roy Searle, in a sermon a few weeks earlier, described the urgent mission of the church as a whole as being to come to terms with a post-Christian world, and to learn again what it is to speak with a minority voice as we ‘sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.’. I suspect Professor Craig might consider that defeatist talk!

But I’m greedy and, schizophrenic though I maybe, I don’t want to make that choice. Furthermore I believe the mission call demands that we don’t fall too heavily on one side or the other of this question. I do feel that we fail our young people, especially, when we focus so much on the experiential and the relational that we leave them ill equipped to counter, or challenge, the reasoned and rational critiques that will come their way, if not at University, then soon after. If the Christian faith is to make significant strides in the coming years, than its challengers will have to be faced, reasonably. Those in the pews will have to be supplied with a new confidence in the coherence of what they believe and the public square will have to be addressed meaningfully.

Having said all that I’m not convinced that the drop-out rate among Christians in higher education, or the slipping away through the back doors of our churches, are entirely to do with earnest discussions with atheistic professors in profound tutorials, or as a result of a discreet reading of the works of Richard Dawkins respectively. Instead, a combination of moral struggle and a real absence of genuine, ongoing, transformative encounter, both in worship, and in the everyday are, I suspect, the chief culprits. The task of nurturing an ongoing intimacy with God has never been more urgent, and will never be found at the conclusion of a debate.

As ever then, we need both head and heart, word and Spirit, mind and body and always to resist the temptation to seek one without the other. Perhaps more weeks like my last one.