… where filmic conventions operate … , we find what is true of many popular films – a consensus that traditional religious faith is deeply untrustworthy and to be placed at the margins of culture if not rejected altogether.

Bryan P. Stone, “Religious Faith and Science in “Contact”,” Journal of Religion and Film 2, no. 2 (October 1998), <www.unomaha.edu/jrf/stonear2.htm>.

Discuss.

A year after it was published, If You Meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him has now been reprinted— twice. The cover is slightly redesigned, with a generous blurb on the back from the Bishop of Buckingham, for which I am grateful— as I am to everyone who has bought the book and spread the word.

The reassuring thing about the reprint is that the egregrious typo on page 9 (for which I, and only I, am responsible) has been corrected.

I am still available for CME days, deanery chapters, diocesan synods, baptisms, bar-mitzvahs and funerals. Contact me if you’d like to hear me justify my ideas!

In a letter to Eberhard Bethge, written from Tegel Prison on 8 June 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer explored the roots of individualism, personal autonomy and its expression in twentieth century European culture. It is very much an improvised excursus (look at the way Bonhoeffer refuses to get into the question of historical data— principally, and reasonably, for the reason that he was excluded from a research library in prison), but it builds on themes that were present in his earliest published work¹, and which were part of his entire professional and pastoral life. The “movement” he refers to in the opening sentence is the so-called ‘autonomy of man’; the “question” he defines later as “Christ and the world come of age”.

The movement that began about the thirteenth century (I’m not going to get involved in any argument about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (in which I should include the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and deals with itself in science, social and political matters, art, ethics, and religion) has in our time reached an undoubted completion. Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the ‘working hypothesis’ called ‘God’. In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt. But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without ‘God’— and, in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, ‘God’ is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more ground.

Roman Catholic and Protestant historians agree that it is in this development that the great defection from God, from Christ, is to be seen; and the more they claim and play off God and Christ against it, the more the development considers itself to be anti-Christian. The world that has become conscious of itself and the laws that govern its own existence has grown self-confident in what seems to us to be an uncanny way. False developments and failures do not make the world doubt the necessity of the course that it is taking, or of its development; they are accepted with fortitude and detachment as part of the bargain, and even an event like the present war is no exception. Christian apologetic has taken the most varied forms of opposition to this self-assurance. Efforts are made to prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of ‘God’. Even though there has been surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the so-called ‘ultimate questions’— death, guilt— to which only ‘God’ can give an answer, and because of which we need God and the church and the pastor. So we live, in some degree, on these so-called ultimate questions of humanity. But what if one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered ‘without God’? Of course, we now have the secularized offshoots of Christian theology, namely existentialist philosophy and psychotherapists, who demonstrate to secure, contented, and happy mankind that it is really unhappy and desperate and simply unwilling to admit that it is in a predicament about which it knows nothing, and from which only they can rescue it. Wherever there is health, strength, security, simplicity, they scent luscious fruit to gnaw at or to lay their pernicious eggs in. They set themselves to drive people to inward despair, and then the game is in their hands. That is secularized methodism. And whom does it touch? A small number of intellectuals, of degenerates, of people who regard themselves as the most important thing in the world, and who therefore like to busy themselves with themselves. The ordinary man, who spends his everyday life at work and with his family, and of course with all kinds of diversions, is not affected. He has neither the time nor the inclination to concern himself with his existential despair, or to regard his perhaps modest share of happiness as a trial, a trouble, or a calamity.²

“People who regard themselves as the most important thing in the world, and who therefore like to busy themselves with themselves.” What a fabulous description of the triumph of Western solipsism!

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: a theological study of the sociology of the church, ed. Clifford J. Green and Joachim von Soosten, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, DBWE 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998). [↩]
2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, 3rd ed. (London: S.C.M. Press, 1967), pp. 325-7 [↩]

Autumn Leaves (Belleville)

(I’m proud to say it, but that’s my boy!)