This was a sermon I was asked to deliver at Emmanuel College in Cambridge. I felt rather sorry for the young woman, presumably full of faith, who had to read out my chosen Old Testament passage.

Sermon for Emmanuel

Since this is armistice day, I want to start with a historical fact. The German army, in the First World War, believed it was fighting for civilisation. In those days, no one thought it necessary to add the prefix “Western”. They thought, before the First World War, that there was only one civilisation. How did they define it? How could they have been so wrong? One hint at an answer is that they gave each soldier two books to remind them what they were fighting for. One was the St John’s Gospel, and the other was a selection of Nietzsche’s writings.

Nietzsche is of course considered the greatest poet of Victorian atheism; the Bible is generally supposed to be on the other side of that dispute. Yet they have something in common. They are both part of the same argument, as Nietzsche very clearly saw; and if you take them together, you have something quite close to the heart of Western civilisation, of the insights, the arguments, and the ways of looking at life which gave us both our values and our self- confidence.

And here they were, working together from the heart of a great civilisation in aid of the most disastrous, cruel, and above all murderous war that the world had known up till then; certainly the war which gave European civilisation a wound from which it has not yet recovered and probably never will. Continue reading →

The TLS seems to have got a new philosophy editor, Tim Crane, and his influence on this week’s issue is remarkable. For a start there is his own long, excellent essay on what religion is and isn’t, exposing the inadequacies of treating is as either a mere set of propositions or only a social arrangement. The only thing this gets wrong is the tentative suggestions that Pentecostalism represented a novelty, or that this is what Pentecostal congregations are in search of.

In principle, it is possible for these two things to be separated: people might gather spontaneously, utter words, and perform some kind of ceremony together, even if these things had never been said or done before. (Perhaps Pentecostals’ speaking in tongues is an example of this kind of thing.)

Not only was the Asuza Street revival an entirely self-conscious attempt to return to the condition of the early Church; the services today are as ritualised as post-77 Grateful Dead concert. So for that matter, is an Alpha Course. Everything is done to condition expectations towards the arrival of the Holy Spirit. See also the “Was he slain or was he pushed?” passage of our church book. Continue reading →