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This year’s Heslington lecture was given by John Bowker, the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions and a widely recognised leading theologian in this area.
At first glance this hour long lecture looked like a remarkably dull way of spending a Wednesday night. What more could I want than to be stuffed into P/X001 with a smattering of students and a large number of highly intellectual looking, scholarly old-types.
It kicked off to a somewhat inauspicious start as I arrived a good five minutes into the talk (anyone who’s ever walked in at the front of P/X001 midway into a lecture will know just what a painful experience that can be). Having heard this lecture described many times as the University’s sop to Christianity I experienced a slight unwillingness to be there. I imagined a very dry, theoretical account of ‘Religion’ relating very little to my experience of a living, active and pretty exciting God.
It soon became apparent that I couldn’t have been more wrong; the talk was interesting and — horror of horrors — relevant to me, inspiring me with one or two thoughts which you, lucky reader are to be graced with now! I found myself intrigued by the topic, that of the millennium, which was discussed in terms of various different religions and cults, many of whom have similar views on the times we are living in. Hindus believe that we are in the final age before the end of everything. Buddhists see that we are in the age of degenerates, Muslims see us drawing near to a time when Islam will be rocked to its foundations and even the pages of the Koran will become blank. In general it seems highly appropriate to most religions that we’ll celebrate the year 2000 through the frivolous spending of lottery money.
On top of this doom and gloom are the millennial cults about which Bowker stated, “There is nothing too weird”. True enough when you consider some of the several-cans-short-of-a-six-pack ideas that many cults have come up with: Comets? Nerve gas? Mass Suicides?
Where do people get these beliefs from and how do they convince others to join them? Bowker suggested that cults gain weight because people are searching for what to believe. “We are as much genetically programmed for religious belief as we are for language” . However, since, as the speaker put it “All religious description is inadequate, fallible, corrigible, provisional and mostly wrong”, imperfect man has a tendency to go the wrong way.
In this there is a lot to be learned. We cannot ever hope to sum God up in words or to classify Him, pretend that we understand His purposes or His character. In fact, to claim that we have the definitive picture of God would be arrogant, dangerous and the first step to becoming a cult ourselves. Bowker suggested that we must always be rational and slightly sceptical when considering any religious doctrine. We should never follow any teaching blindly but should question everything. This might sound a fairly heretical statement but it is one that we Christians should take a lot more notice of.
We are all too willing to swallow every sermon that we listen to without ever going away and thinking about what we’ve heard. However unlikely it is, speakers and preachers can be sincerely wrong. I once heard someone say in a Bible study on Fasting, that we do not have to fast because Jesus never fasted in the Bible. “Quite right” I thought “And we shouldn’t have to do anything which Jesus didn’t”. Until someone mentioned something about a certain forty days in a desert …
We need, as Christians who want to witness effectively, to understand not only what we believe but why we believe it. How many people know why we believe “Jesus descended into Hell”, during the three days he was dead? Why exactly do we believe in the Trinity when the word “Trinity” never appears in the Bible?
However, Bowker was quick to point out that head knowledge of doctrine is obviously not our sole tool for evangelism. We need to live lives based on the truths that we have learnt and the experiences that we have of Jesus. To many people evangelical Christianity must look as weird as many cults do, but it is by our fruits, our actions and our daily lives, that we will be known as different. We should make space for God in simple acts of faith, hope and love and He will reveal Himself to us. We cannot hope to reach God by trying to understand Him; God draws close to us as we are. We don’t need to struggle with mind-blowing concepts and theologies to be near God, we just need to be open to letting Him come near to us.
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Last modified: 25th November 2005