It’s said that during the filming of the 1975 movie Jaws, the director Stephen Spielberg thought the giant rubber shark from his props department so “unscary” that he decided to shoot the film with the shark supposedly hidden underwater for almost the whole time; suggesting its fearsomeness and size with clever acting and suspenseful music.
Later he credited this with the film’s success; a plastic fake you never quite see is far more frightening than it would be in full view.
“Autonomy” has, it seems, become the giant rubber shark of our age. “Autonomy” means “self-law” – that is, the idea that each person should and has the right to decide what is right for himself (or herself) to do. This idea has attained in the last few years a moral force which seems to carry all before it. If a thing (whether it’s abortion, gay marriage, or most recently assisted suicide) is justified on the basis of autonomy – “my life, my death, my choice” as journalist Esther Rantzen has put it – then the argument is considered settled. And often as Christians we either give up, not knowing how to answer, or else we fall back on “autonomy” arguments ourselves: after all, isn’t “my life, my choice” a great way to justify our Christian faith in a sometimes hostile secular world?
Too many of our churches offer no connection to God
In my home town of York in the 1960s, archaeologists discovered a stone pillar. It has originally towered nearly 10 …