In Milan Kundera’s 1975 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Czechoslovakian president Gustav Husak—the “President of Forgetting”—declares, “Children! You are the future!” Kundera goes on to say that this is true “not because they will one day be adults but because humanity is becoming more and more a child, because childhood is the image of the future.”
Douglas Murray’s recent Spectator article on the Church of England confirms the Czech writer’s prophetic insight. Canterbury Cathedral’s “silent disco” in February and Peterborough Cathedral’s upcoming November “rave” certainly speak of a childish age. These buildings were built for the serious and sacred purpose of worship; that was why generations invested many decades and resources in their construction. To use them now for events that could easily be held in a makeshift tent says much about the sacred nature of the trivial hedonism of our age.
It also says much about a church that has long since lost any confidence in the gospel codified in her Thirty-Nine Articles, Book of Common Prayer, and Book of Homilies. Recent reports reveal that she is increasingly abandoning the word “church” in favor of other descriptions, such as “community.” And anyone gazing on The Queen’s Window in Westminster Abbey is more likely to recall scenes from SpongeBob than be awed by thoughts of the transcendent creator and redeemer of mankind. Lose the gospel, return to childishness; this seems to be the order of the day.
Indeed, this childishness is the inevitable outcome of the kind of theological liberalism that has dominated so many churches for several generations. Ironically, theological liberalism has often been the product of some of the finest minds. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the notional father of Protestant liberalism, was one of the dazzling intellects of his day. The Tübingen School, which did huge damage to orthodox belief, boasted an array of stellar scholars. And in the Anglophone world, figures such as C. H. Dodd and John A. T. Robinson were men of true academic substance. Yet liberal theology, as it has shaped the worshiping life and liturgy of the church and the attitudes of her people over many years, seems only to have tended toward one practical direction: childishness.
Read it all in First Things
Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
