Abstract
In this New Year’s issue experts from a variety of disciplines bring their insights to theology. In ‘New directions’ John Lloyd brings his professional training as a scientist to interrogate theological understandings of eschatology. James Crockford brings his training as a professional musician to understand faith better. And Philip Barnes brings his long experience as a religious educationist to raise important questions about the role of humanism in religious education in modern Britain. In addition this issue has two contributions that raise key pastoral topics. Lydia Schumacher offers a fresh way of looking at Aquinas’s so-called ‘proofs for the existence of God’, seeing them as more pastoral than philosophical in intention. And Tom Clammer and Simon Wilkinson offer a particularly poignant interpretation of the difficult (and textually dubious) Mark 16.18. They contrast their own experience of unwelcome medical diagnoses with brash claims about miraculous healing.
A new book by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is always a delight. He writes so well, so clearly and so profoundly:
Jonathan Sacks,
Now that he is no longer Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks is also freer to admit the weaknesses (along with the strengths) of his co-religionists. This new book confronts the vexed issue of religious violence. He is not persuaded that violence is endemic within religious traditions (he is less bleak than John Bowker who featured in my previous editorial), but he does acknowledge that Islamic, Christian and Jewish fundamentalists have committed egregious acts of violence ‘in God’s name’. This book is a bold attempt to understand why this is so and, more importantly, how it might be overcome.
Sacks argues that both religious and secular violence has roots in three aspects of human thinking and behaviour: dualism, scapegoating and sibling rivalry. Dualists divide the world into ‘children of light’ and ‘children of darkness’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Secular Stalinists did this as much in the past as do religious Islamists in the present – dehumanizing and then murdering those who differ from themselves. Scapegoating has affected Jews for much of their history. Understandably Sacks pays particular attention to anti-Semitism, not, he maintains, because Jews alone have suffered from being treated as scapegoats, but because they illustrate scapegoating so clearly even in the modern world (where anti-Semites regularly blame all Jews for the failures of Israel). Sibling rivalry has often disfigured relationships between different members of the three Abrahamic faiths.
Alongside this new analysis is a more familiar theme that has occupied much of Sack’s recent writings – namely, a critique of Western individualism and moral relativism. He argues that the latter is powerless to respond credibly to fundamentalists. He also points out to Western secularists that their hope that religion will eventually disappear from the modern world is flawed, if only because religious minorities in the West are significantly out-breeding them! He has spotted a point long known to demographers, explaining for example why Mormons are increasing and Episcopalians declining in the US (the obvious answer is that observant Mormons have almost twice as many children and not that their faith is more attractive to the American people).
Sacks ends with a passionate plea for Jews, Christians and Muslims to move away from dualism, scapegoating and sibling rivalry, and recover a purer form of faith: We need to recover the absolute values that make Abrahamic monotheism the humanising force it has been at its best: the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, the twin imperatives of justice and compassion, the moral responsibility of the rich for the poor, the commands to love the neighbour and stranger, the insistence on peaceful means of conflict resolution and respectful listening to the other side of a case, forgiving the injuries of the past and focusing instead on building a future in which the children of the world, of all colours, faith and races, can live together in grace and peace. These are the ideals on which Jews, Christians and Muslims can converge, widening their embrace to include those of other faiths and none. (p. 263)
An excellent book to buy for the New Year.