Can God open his coffin?
GOD'S FUNERAL
By A.N. Wilson
Penguin
The Victorian era continues to exert a fascination for many of us. Living, as we do, in an age when the decline of the church seems terminal, when each new set of statistics underlines the seriousness of the situation, there is an attraction about an age when Christianity seemed dominant.
But were the seeds of our present decline planted during that age? This is the question behind A.N. Wilson's book God's Funeral. Because there is another perspective on that confident, religious age: it was also the age of doubt. The term 'agnostic' was first coined during Victoria's reign. Darwin's theory of evolution seemed to strike like an axe at the root of Christian certainty. Books like The Way of all Flesh and Fathers and Sons charted in painful detail the sundering of family relationships as sons, and some daughters, found the new intellectual climate inclement to the faith of their fathers.
The dust-jacket says: 'By the end of the 19th century, almost all the great writers, artists and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity, and many had abandoned belief in God altogether ... by 1900, the Church, so vastly rich, so politically and socially powerful, was seen by many as spiritually empty, however full its pews might be of a Sunday.'
Important story
Wilson's thesis is that the present weakness of the church is rooted in this revolution. As we cannot turn the clock back, the key to survival in this harsher spiritual climate is in adaptation: the church must accept the validity of many of these changes and retune her message to accommodate them.
It has to be said; there is an important story to be told here. And Wilson can be an entertaining storyteller. The book is a sort of gallery of Victorian greats, and we see them in the grandeur of their achievements and the eccentricity of their characters. As such, it is a lively introduction to the intellectual history of the 19th century.
Wilson does correct some popular misunderstandings. On the whole subject of Darwinism, for example, he points out that it did not lead to a large-scale rejection of faith by scientists, who largely accepted its conclusions. 'It would be true to say that among Victorian men of science, Christian commitment was not the exception but the rule', and the leading geologists of the day, whose researches before and after Origin of the Species helped underpin the Darwinian theory, 'were all believers in a Deity'. Lord Shaftesbury, who could be a formidable defender of the faith, was quite untroubled by the theory of evolution.
But, for all the brilliance of the writing, ultimately this fails to be an important book. It's not simply that Wilson's prejudices against evangelical faith are a constant irritation. Those familiar with his earlier books Jesus and Paul will have expected this, and won't be surprised to read that it's highly improbable that the Gospels contain the actual words of Jesus.
The fact that this is a sprawling narrative with little attempt at serious analysis, is as if Wilson has simply trawled the wide sea of Victorian doubt and laid out for our admiration all the colourful and bizarre creatures caught in his nets. A book that portrays Karl Marx and George Eliot, John Ruskin and Annie Besant (the contraceptive pioneer) obviously lacks a unifying theme beyond the rejection of Christianity.
And, eventually, the book fails in its remedy. Wilson, the ex-Anglican who converted to Catholicism can only suggest that the survival of the church lies in adopting some kind of Catholic Modernism. What that means is that the Catholic church should follow its Protestant brethren in absorbing liberal and modernistic teaching that denies the supernatural and sees the Bible simply as man's flawed attempt to understand God.
We should reject that not simply on theological grounds. The history of the past 50 years has demonstrated that the cure is worse than the disease. Historians of religion have noted a fascinating irony here. Churches that have accepted that the gospel needs to be stripped of its miraculous and supernatural elements in order to appeal to modern man are just those churches that have suffered most in the stampede away from religion. It is the churches that continue to proclaim historic Christianity that have the best hopes of flourishing in our sceptical world. That is the fatal flaw in Wilson's thesis.
Jeff Saunders,
Worcester
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