It comes to something when the affairs of the Anglican Communion become the stuff of light satirical comedy; it is even stranger when the satirical comedy is pointedly favourable towards the Archbishop of Canterbury.

UK listeners might have heard “The Now Show” on BBC Radio 4 last weekend. If so, then you will have been delighted by Mitch Benn’s song in support of Dr Rowan Williams (”who knows which bits of the bible are no longer true”). If you haven’t discovered the “Listen Again” facility on the BBC’s website, then this is for you:

 

 Mitch Benn and Dr Rowan Williams [1:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Lord knows there are many of us who wish the song were true!

For Niebuhr there are two parts to the question of finding meaning in Christ. First, belief in Christ means belief in God, “to be related to the One to whom he [Christ] undeviatingly points”. Second, and in the opposite direction, because Christ is the Son of God, so completely immersed in the perfect will of the Father, he becomes the “moral mediator of the Father’s will towards men.”¹ Thus there is a double moral movement, “with men toward God, with God toward men; from the world to the Other, from the Other to the world.” Christ is “mediatorial not median… He exists rather as the focusing point in the continuous alternation of movements from God to man and man to God.”²

Niebuhr then moves to a consideration of the other half of the problem: how does one define “culture” so as to be able to usefully and accurately measure it against the given definition of Christ?

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1. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 28. [↩]
2. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, pp. 28-29. [↩]