Greenbelt diary (3)

Alistair McGrath

Pete Rollins

I queued to hear Rob Bell first thing and didn't get in but did see Sam Norton who was also in the queue. From there I went to hear Chris Dingle speak on music and faith. He argued that all music is inherently sacred and provides a glimpse of eternity as we lose our sense of time while listening to exist for a time in the eternal now. Clearly this depends on the extent to which we lose ourselves in the music but I've certainly had that experience and once read an interesting interview with Van Morrison who, at that time, viewed his music and concerts as inducing that experience and taking the listener into the heart of silence.

The next item on my schedule was the Simone Weil celebration with Grahame Davies and Michael Symmons Roberts. This rapidly became less of a celebration and more of a critique as, while the contributors were challenged by Weil's attempts to eliminate the gap between how she lived and what she believed, they were also disturbed her martyr complex, jewish self-hate, and egotistical impersonality. She had a brilliant mind and it is fascinating to see someone so intellectually rigorous come to faith in Christ. She also wrote beautifully and this is perhaps the clue to the loss of celebration from the debate as, while we heard about Weil from the two contributors and from their writings about her, we never actually heard from Weil herself. Her writings were not read or quoted at any length, so we never heard her beautiful writing or the reasoning of her brilliant mind and, therefore, it was possible for us to focus on the issues that we have with her death at the expense of celebrating her work.

I hadn't intended to hear Alistair McGrath but, on arriving at the wrong venue, decided to stick around and appreciated his debunking of Richard Dawkins (although much of it I had already read in The Dawkins Delusion). A very structured speaker, he neatly summed up his argument in this talk as being that the New Atheism represents a sense of anger that religion is very much still here when, by the reckoning of secularists, it should have died out years ago. The arguments of Dawkins et al have actually made it easier to talk about God now than was the case ten years ago and we should have confidence to engage in the debate because of our understanding that Christianity was gifted to us by God and of the interest that there is i our culture to talk about God.

Mark Vernon would have been unlikely to agree with McGrath's sense of confidence. He is both a former priest and former atheist who as an agnostic is a tutor at 'The School of Life', a new organisation offering short courses on life, love, work, play, and politics. Vernon argued that agnosticism has always been a part of Christianity and offered seven tips for being a religious agnostic; the practices of questioning, love, knowledge, writing, negation, suspension, and wonder. However, if we accept that these practices (which acknowledge the existence of doubt in faith and of limits to our human knowing) have consistently been a part of Christianity, where is the need to practice them outside of Christianity itself. It seemed to me that in this session Vernon was essentially describing his return to a nuanced faith as opposed to any sort of journey away from it.

Vernon's session was followed by a fairly uproarious panel session on the theme of art, propaganda and evangelism. Uproarious, primarily because Billy Childish was playing the lovable anarchist to the hilt ably assisted by Angie Fadel. One felt for Adrienne Chaplin and Rita Brock gamely trying to make their serious academicly rigorous contributions in the face of Childish's faux 'I no nothing' stance coupled with occasional shafts of wit and profundity. There are times when the dryness of logic, reason and catagorisation are revealed and this seemed like it might be one of those occasions. A concensus of sorts was cobbled together around the notion that communicating a pre-conceived message or idea through art doesn't do justice to art and that, currently, conceptual artists are those most inclined to deliberately and cheerfully throw themselves into this faultline.

There was more iconclasm to be had as Pete Rollins took to the stage to argue that identification with Christ is dereliction, as we identify with one who, at the cross, is stripped of identity and meaning. 'Religionless Christianity' sees Christ resurrected in the community which bears his name as our identification with him enables us to escape the system that defines us and take responsibility for the dreaming of new possibilities. Rollins uses Slavoj Žižek and 'Death of God' theology to flesh out what Dietrich Bonhoeffer may have meant by 'religionless Christianity'. In doing so, he argued for a closing of the gap between how we live and what we believe that was at least as radical as that of Simone Weil.

Rollins argues that we often treat Church as a sop to the lack of radicality in our lives i.e. that hearing about the need for loving sacrifice becomes a subsitute for actually living sacrifical and loving lives. It is, of course, entirely possible that, for those of us present, listening to Rollins is a part of the same game giving us the frisson of radicality without the need to follow through but the challenge was to the real transformation of rebirth.

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Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The UK.