“Mark Tindall” <> wrote in message news:<>…

from Peter Cameron’s “Heretic” (Doubleday; Sydney: 1994)

p. 1

I have always been conscious that the church resembles a fancy dress

party: people are rarely what they seem.

p.2

I sensed already, without being able to articulate it, that if God

were ever to be reached, it would have to be in spite of the church.

…But even he couldn’t succeed in banishing the boredom from the

service, that terrible boredom which is peculiar to church – the

tightness in the stomach, the longing to jump up and rush out.

p 10

… that smug arrogance which is peculiar to certain religious people,

and which is lavishly illustrated in every church.

p. 14 – 15

I knew an shared the outsider’s instinctive distaste for all things

ecclesiastical. I had a revulsion for the way in which ministers and

the church seemed to possess God and toi dispense him, like handing

out sweets to small children. I wanted to destroy this approach to

God, this smugness; I wanted to debunk their pomposity and solemnity,

the terrible monotony of their religion – but I could only do so from

within. … The church has buried God, and he can only be dug up again

inside the church. So I became a minister.

p. 17

The minister to my mind was not a hierophant – a revealer of sacred

things – but a fellow traveller, someone whose task it was to be more

honest and open about his frailty and doubts than anyone else, a

professional doubter, an intellectual rather than a moral conscience.

p.18

One of the great services which Freud did was to draw attention to the

element of guilt and neurosis in religion.

p. 20 – 21

God and morality are separable. … the model Christian is not what W

H Auden called the tight-arsed old maid … I never came across so

much unpleasantness, and bitterness, and anger, and sheer nastiness,

as I did in the church.

p. 23

I wanted to show the twenty year olds outside the church that

Christianity is not a system of rules; that Jesus came precisely in

order to tell people that God is not a legislator and that response to

God is not a matter of obedience to laws; that whenever a religion

sees its response to God in terms of obedience … it loses sight of

God.

p. 25

The religious imagination is stifled, because he impression given is

that there are no ways of responding to God except those authorised by

the biblical norms. What I wanted to do was liberate people from

their slavery to the Bible, and to give it a new status. … I wanted

to show them that Bible is not a divine book of rules, but a

collection of very human responses to God, in principle no more

important or significant than their own. The Bible should be a

servant, not a master: we should use it, not allow it to control us.

‘Everyman his own evangelist’ was one of my slogans.

from Peter Cameron’s “Heretic” (Doubleday; Sydney: 1994)

p. 38 I regarded Fundamentalist students as defective Christians who, I hoped, might eventually grow up.

p. 39 I did, however, in the course of the interview trot out my favourite quotation from Cardinal Newman; ‘To live is to change, and to be perfect is to change often’. When the interview was eventually printed in Australian Presbyterian Living, the quotation appeared in the following form: ‘To live is to change, but to be perfect is to change not’. A Freudian slip if ever there was one (assuming it was not deliberate), because the misquotation encapsulates the Fundamentalist position.

p. 49 – 50 For many people the Bible represents the security of a book that tells them what to think. The New Testament seems to them to be the record of a religious golden age, when the church was strong and united, people knew what they believed, and Christianity was just a question of spreading the good news. And faced with the confusion, the intellectual and moral turmoil of the present age, they shout: ‘Let’s go back to the Bible, let’s go back to the ideals of the early church, let’s have a resurgence of Biblical teaching and Biblical values and Biblical authority’. Now this is fantasy, it’s seeing history all claret and no spurs. You find it in the way the apostle Paul is appealed to as the supreme authority. But in fact Paul’s letters indicate first that the early Christian establishment was very reluctant to grant him any authority at all, and second that he himself was very reluctant to grant anyone else any authority. His opponents dismissed him as a charlatan, with no real independent status: they said that his authority was derived from that of the true apostles, and that his teaching was all wrong anyway. … [Paul] never intended to say: ‘This is how it is, and this is how all Christians will express themselves for the next two thousand years.’ … in fact, the irony is that the mentality of those in the present day who appeal to Paul, is exactly the mentality of Paul’s first-century opponents, who slavishly appealed to the authority of the Jewish law.

p. 52 .. Christianity is a religion above all of freedom. Because freedom is a prerequisite for everything else. You cannot love without freedom, you can only have fear. You cannot have growth without freedom, you can only have obedience. … There is in fact a New Puritanism on the prowl in our society, and it has to be resisted.

p. 64 … to lay down the ‘parameters of Christian freedom’ sounds very like what Kierkegaard would call ‘painting the god Mars in the armour which made him invisible’.

p. 70 … like the Donatists, of whom Augustine said: ‘The clouds roll with thunder, that the House of the Lord shall be built throughout the earth: and these frogs sit in there marsh and croak, “We are the only Christians”‘.

p. 76 We do not, however do justice to the Bible, and we will not succeed in formulating our own unique response to god, if we simply obey the Bible blindly, or slavishly imitate the response it contains.

p. 78 … the Fundamentalist approach to the Bible is not, in spite of the claims of its adherents, identical with that of every orthodox Christian since the days of the early church: it is a relatively new phenomenon, formulated in response to, or in reaction to, the results of ‘liberal’ scholarship.

from Peter Cameron’s “Heretic” (Doubleday; Sydney: 1994)

p. 151 [Fundamentalism] … is very much the case of the kingdom of the blind, in which the one-eyed man is king. I was quite prepared to admit I was a theological cyclops, but I didn’t see why I should be judged by bats.

p. 174 -175 The intellectual shortcomings of the Fundamentalist are both obvious and notorious. … the dominant motivating force behind Fundamentalism is a hunger for power and authority. This is the real reason for ascribing absolute and literal authority to the Bible: the Fundamentalist minister derives back from the authoritative Bible his own relative authority. It is the classic ploy of the priestly class, to bolster up the system which supports it – except here it is not the system which is elevated, it is the scripture. Of course ideally the Fundamentalist wants absolute power; he would like to turn the state into a theocracy, and sometimes, for example in the Islamic world, the dream comes true. … In the church his main concern is to impose his understanding of the Bible. The Bible is seen as a statute book, the proper response to which is obedience. Essentially this means obedience to the minister. (The attraction, particularly to some young people, is the security and certainty such an attitude brings: you know where you are with God, and you know where God is. the trouble is of course that it is not God at all, it is an idol.) A literalism that begins with being merely ridiculous gradually becomes more and more puritanical and lacking in compassion. Stained-glass windows are destroyed because they are idolatrous, and women are excluded from the ministry because they threaten to undermine both the power and the vanity of the male minister.

p. 176 [Fundamentalism] seems to me to constitute a considerable threat to both the church and society. And those in the church who are of a different persuasion have a duty to both the church and to society to resist it. There is a great deal at stake. In some ways the gravest objection to the Fundamentalists is not that they instil in some young people a perversion of Christianity, but that they turn away many more young people from the whole idea of Christianity.

p. 177 … the greater the theological spectrum the healthier he church.

p. 178

… quoting from James Barr’ book “Fundamentalism” on the three distinguishing features of the Fundamentalist ‘… an assurance that those who do not share their religious viewpoint are not really true Christians at all.’

p. 179 … how anxious the Fundamentalist is not to be labelled a Fundamentalist. … On the third distinguishing feature proposed by James Barr – exclusiveness and intolerance – it is arguable that the attempt to silence me and ultimately expel me for disagreement with them was in itself enough to qualify my opponents as Fundamentalists.

p. 191 …I suggested that according to the Bible itself God is fallible, because God is represented in the Old Testament at times as having changed his mind, as having got things wrong and started off again. It was really a reductio absurdum, but of course they’ve latched onto that as an additional charge now, alleging that I think God is fallible. This of course is absurd. I mean, God is truth, and it’s quite incoherent to suggest that truth is fallible, and therefore you can’t say that God is fallible. What I was really trying to say was that this was an example of the fallibility of the Bible, but of course they’ve missed the point completely as usual.

p. 194 [Fundamentalism] represents a kind of totalitarian attitude to life, which permeates the whole of civilisation and society, and unless we can challenge it and meet it at the local level, then the prospect, as I’ve said, is an Orwellian nightmare. it undermines independence of thought, the freedom of the individual, and imposes a kind of rigid uniformity to code book – which of course is its attraction, because you feel safer with rules and you feel safe with an authoritarian God telling you what to do: you know where you are with him. But that’s not my understanding of God.

p. 195 I’ve met more nastiness and misunderstanding in the church than in any other walk of life. But it needn’t necessarily be like that.

p. 195 The Bible …[is] … a collection of human responses to God (very human, some of them all too human), which we are at liberty to use in the process of formulating our own individual, unique response to God. we don’t do that by imitating these responses slavishly. I mean God, if he exists, doesn’t want innumerable clones of the apostle Paul. He wants us to respond to him, each of us in our own unique way. And we can use the Bible to do that, but we don’t do it by obeying it slavishly and blindly.

p. 196 … the sort of God that the Fundamentalist puts across, the authoritarian God who tells people what to do, and is pleased with them when they obey and punishes them when thy don’t – that to my mind is the sort of God that, if he exists, I don’t want. As Dostoevsky said, I would be happier to return my entrance ticket to heaven.

p. 197

… the numbers in a church are not necessarily a good criterion of it’s health.

p. 200

When I add to God the words ‘if he exists’, I have in mind the saying of a German theologian: Gott existiert nicht, er geschiet. …God doesn’t exist, he happens. … There is another German theological slogan: Die Sache Jesu geht weiter. Christianity is on the move. The Jesus affair goes on: it develops, it has a future. Fundamentalism doesn’t move, it will never get any further. it lies petrified in the past, although it tries to persuade people that it is eternally valid. There are of course innumerable logical and historical arguments against it. But the best argument against it is simply this, that it contradicts the spirit of Christianity: the God of Fundamentalism doesn’t exist because he doesn’t happen, and the Jesus of Fundamentalism doesn’t move forwards because he has no future.

p. 207

… Fundamentalism is wrong and can be shown to be wrong: and by ‘wrong’ I mean illogical, unhistorical, a perversion of Christianity – in a word, a lie. …if they hold to a position that is demonstrably false, then if they know that it is demonstrably false they are dishonest, and if they do not know that it is demonstrably false they are stupid. A scientist after all would not hesitate to call either dishonest or stupid anyone who believed the earth a flat. Why should theologians and ministers be so mealy-mouthed about Fundamentalist Christians? … is that the purpose of Christianity – to offend as few people as possible? And, in doing so, to look as if you can believe as many a six impossible things before breakfast? What is at stake the, in this tale, is not freedom of speech, but freedom from Fundamentalism, freedom from a lie.

p. 211

Christianity is indefinable, and perhaps essentially incommunicable. To try to answer the question ‘What is a Christian?’ is, as kierkegard would say, to try to paint the god mars in the armour which made him invisible. to the extent that we define Christianity we betray it. The most that can be said is that Christianity is openness to god and other people, and so far as we elaborate on that we diminish this openness. And it follows from such a requirement of continuous openness to he living God and to one’s ever changing neighbour that no one is ever a Christian, in the sense of having arrived at a completed status, like a chrysalis having become a butterfly. There are no fully paid up members of the church. Christians are always in the process of becoming Christians, they must always live in the tension between being Christians, and being not yet Christians. In a paradoxical way, Christians must renounce the possibility of ever being Christians. their Christianity is always an approximation.