Suggested Bible reading: Matthew 7, v21-28

The Church would, I imagine, invariably, without regard to denomination, define it as a ‘baptised person’ by which I take it they mean someone who has undergone the rite of baptism involving washing in water in one form or another. But that too is not what I mean by being ‘a Christian’. I know far too many people who are good, civilised, and highly human, moral and sober in every regard, loving and careful towards their neighbours, and even who regard themselves as respecters and observers of Christ’s admonitions in favour of the ‘good life’ who have not been baptised and are in no discernible way different in their beliefs or their behaviour from those who have.

There has to be more to it than that. To begin with, (which is why I have called this little booklet From Ground Zero), it presupposes that baptism per se as a rite does something, acts upon the individual to make him a different sort of person. Not only do I observe no such thing in others, I do not observe it in me. It is that second observation that is crucial. I may be mistaken about someone else; after all I know him or her only at one remove. Myself I know as no one else can. I may be mistaken but try as I might I cannot detect any difference. In fact I was baptised as an infant but came to Christ only 27 years later.

In a letter to a newspaper (Times, March 12 1998) The Right Reverend Vincent Nichols wrote; There should surely always be a critical distance between Church teaching and the expectations of any political culture. Later a respondent wrote (March 18): Could it be that too much of the Christian Churches’ teaching, unchanged and unchallenged for many centuries, is unliveable in the 20th century? Surely? Could it be? Do not these phrases point up the contrast between the two viewpoints? What is the feature that distinguishes the Christian from other men and women we live, work and play with every day?

Let’s start with a cherished idea of the Church, one that runs through the Bible from start to finish, but which the modern world finds hard to accept. Which is right? That cherished idea is this. God has a plan, and has had from the very beginning. Plan? What plan?

Blackadder’s Baldrick says, "I’ve got a clever plan!" So has God! Or has he? When we look at the world with an open mind, and consider thoughtfully what it is that we see, and draw deductions from it, which are (in so far as it is possible for us) free from preconceived notions, is it being run according to a ‘plan’? What do we mean by a ‘plan’ anyway?

Unless we mean a programmed approach towards a preconceived completion that has a form and shape that has been envisaged from the outset, then I find it hard to imagine what else we can mean. In fact I don’t think the world is executing such a plan, or that there is a plan in those terms at all. I don’t think God has a plan; that there is in any sense of the word a sort of celestial blueprint that He is working towards or that we can execute.

The world that science studies, if I understand it aright, shows no evidence of it. Order yes, process yes, a beginning yes, an end quite likely. But a plan apparently not. What then are we to make of the Bible when it seems to imply, even when it doesn’t say so specifically, that there is a plan afoot, whose end we do not see, whose working and objectives are in God’s hands and outside our understanding, but which we must nevertheless conform to or suffer an eternal destruction?

All the things that science sees, order, process etc., are not incompatible with a God who is at once Creator and has a purpose. A purpose does not necessarily demand a plan of the kind that requires a programmed sequence of events (however much it may be varied to cater for aberrations and accidents) in order to fulfil it. A machine doesn’t need a plan. It functions the way it does because that is the way it is made, and it achieves the end result of its purpose (baked beans sealed in a can, say) because the way it works requires that to happen when you feed it with baked beans and empty cans.

Is the world a machine? If it is then there is no way we can change anything, or have any influence upon it. A machine does not have a will of its own. It cannot ‘sin’, nor can it do good, or obey, or disobey, or choose. It can only do what its designer has built into it. I was a designer of machines and I know what I’m talking about! Can it be planned in some other way?

If the world is a planned one, we can’t help thinking sometimes that it has gone awry, that the planner has lost control of it. The church has said that is because man is evil, or at any rate there is evil abroad in it. But perhaps it is after all the way it’s made; but made without the characteristics of a machine.

What we have, I believe, is a world of ‘becoming’. It is a process going forward, from primitive and simple and crude beginnings to ever more orderly and complex and sophisticated completions. Of course because it is a ‘process’ and not a ‘plan’ it has its ups and downs. But on the whole and in its completion it is up rather than down that it finishes; on the whole it progresses rather than regresses. That is the nature of its Creation. I say ‘creation’ rather than ‘making’ advisedly as will become apparent.

A poem lovely as a tree - But only God can make a tree! True? False? Well, only partly, and perhaps something of both. It depends, as C.E.M. Joad used to say, on what you mean by ‘make’. The trees we see around us are the product of a long history of development, part created, part natural evolution, part deliberately man made. There are those who doubt the validity of Darwinian evolutionary theory; but to question the validity of the evolutionary principle is to live in a flat earth. At the root of it is the question, what is creation? Well, what is it?

The only sort of creation we experience directly as humans is humans creating. Of course in a sense we all do it all the time, but sometimes we do it in an especially obvious form, or watch others doing it. Painting a picture or modelling a statue. Or designing a building. Or building a bridge? Or a machine? Knitting a jumper? Doing the washing up? Yes, I believe all of these.

When we humans create, what we do is to give something inside ourselves, some part of ourselves, an existence outside, apart from ourselves. We make actual, actualise, ‘real’-ise, that something. In those ways that our creativity is most obviously exhibited, most creators say that what they experience is a huge, a self-embracing sense of joy, excitement, pleasure, anguish, the sense of an outpouring of the self, that he cannot get away from and cannot give up on. It is that that he ‘makes actual’. It seems to me that what those emotions and feelings are the expression of, more than anything else that the language can describe, is his love. It is his love, not love of himself, not love for anything, not love of anyone, but his capacity for love, his ‘love-ability’, that he ‘makes actual’. And nowhere is this more true than when we ‘make ourselves actual’ in a newborn child.

If we make our love actual in this way when we create, surely it is because it is a characteristic implanted by creation, by the Creator himself in the act of creating. We are ‘love made actual’. The Creator’s creating is of the same kind as ours.

Thus, his creating has produced a creation which is itself creative. We his creatures create, the natural order itself creates, the universe creates. Creating is what it is for. Therefore it is evolutionary in character; self-creation is evolutionary or it is nothing; evolution is creation going on before our eyes, self-creative. It is progressive, a ‘process’ going forward from a beginning to an end, love working towards its consummation in perfect ‘loveliness’, made actual not only in being but in action too.

War arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon ... Is this imagery, here taken from Revelation, of a war between good and evil (in whatever terms you like to put it) representative of the universe as we actually find it? Many people find it very difficult to believe in a God who creates a ‘good’ world with a built in ‘bad’-ness. They think, with I suspect some reason, that he must be either incompetent or dishonest.

But if the world is created as a making actual of God’s love, then I do not believe that this sort of imagery describes what we see, even crudely. For what we observe, in so far as our observation is of a real world, is a world ‘in process’, a world of becoming, a world in which progression is from the simple, disordered, unthinking and unable to the complex, ordered, comprehending and enabled. This is the sort of world that science describes. In a very real way it is the modern view of the universe.

If evil is not a principle still less a ‘person’ (the Devil) put in or crept in from ‘outside’, then what is it? What is this ‘war’ that has been the imagery from the past and is (if one takes the rhetoric of some modern exponents of Islam literally) that of some in the present? The idea of creation as a making actual of love surely gives us a clue.

For the process that the creation, the self-creating creation, is engaged in, is on that proposition a continuous one. It is, from its beginning in a ‘big bang’ to its consummation in the perfection of love, love expressed in being (that is in things that do not possess life) and in action in, by and through things which do have life, and in the ultimate (to our present knowledge) of the making actual of the Divine love in human life.

The ‘good’ therefore consists in the advance, the setting forward, the making effective of that process; ‘evil’ is its frustration, its prevention, its subversion, its perversion. The process is intrinsically ‘good’, it moves with a certain inevitability towards the ‘more good’. Yet that inevitability is not itself inevitable. Self-creativity itself is not inevitable, and its consequences are not inevitable. Unless self-creativity is free to create of itself, is ‘free’ in the sense that we understand ‘free will’ to be free, then it is not and cannot be ‘creative’. It necessarily and unavoidably becomes the actions of a ‘machine’, governed absolutely by the rules of the machine. And that is not the sort of world we discover when we look at it.

That is the world we live in. We have to measure our place in it on the basis of what we find, for these are the realities. What is more, they are the very realities that ‘betray’ the hand of the Creator; they are his fingerprints.

The modern view of knowledge is that it is not and cannot be. Knowledge, any knowledge whatsoever, simply isn’t like that. It is first of all filtered through our knowing processes (brain, senses, understanding and so forth) and secondly it is limited by the nature of what it is that is knowable about it. We cannot know something which is intrinsically unknowable to us. Even revelation is subject to that universal rule.

We may see Islam as thinking of the Koran as dictated by God. It is certainly not how we should understand the Bible. The Bible is a human attempt to describe the human perception of God and of the activity (if that is what it is) of God in human affairs. It is illuminated by the Divine action but not controlled by it. It is still subject to all the limitations on human perception; it is not the divine perception.

History as we understand it wasn’t invented until the fifth century BC. By then much of the Old Testament was in much of its modern form. So it isn’t that. Nor is most of the New Testament though the beginnings of a historical perspective are beginning to appear. It wasn’t until what has been called the Great Secularisation or Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that the historical, process-ional view of the world really and effectively got under way, the view we now regard as natural and self-evident. We must understand the Bible in that context if we are to give it a proper place in our modern society.

There is no celestial plan; the world is a becoming one, a world of varying degrees of good from zero love to complete love; it is a world that is limited, finite in every sense. That, I believe, the Bible describes in the language and thought patterns available to its writers. We must see it through their eyes, and translate what they describe into the understanding that we now have of history, knowledge, the realities of the real world around us.

God is transcendent, other, unknowable except in the terms of our capacity to know, in terms of the knowable to us. A God who is non-transcendent is inevitably one limited in the same way that the created order is. If we see the world as finite, not only in the theological sense, but in the scientific sense also, that means it seems to me, that the concept of one-ness lies at its core. Over its whole span one and one make two. Except when there is love. And quite suddenly one and one make one, it penetrates through to a whole different kind of one-ness, a one-ness that belongs I believe to the God world. The final revelation at the heart of it is a knowability given to us in Jesus Christ.

From the revelation given by the created world we live in on the one hand and of the Bible on the other we receive two fundamental insights. One is that the basic, driving principle of creation and of the world is love; that God is the source of that driving principle. The other that it is a limited world, finite, unable by itself to reach the ‘otherness’ of God.

The modern discoveries of science add, it seems to me, two more; first, that the concept of ONE is fundamental to any real understanding of the sort of world we live in, and second, that the world is evolutionary in character, it is a process. Both these ideas are also contained within the Bible view. But the Bible view is not from a modern standpoint, so it is expressed in terms that seem to set it against science. We must see it in more realistic terms if we are to understand both Bible and science.

The first consequence of the nature of ONE might be expressed in the form; ‘This one is not that one,’ ‘I am not you,’ ‘man is not God.’ It defines the sort of differences, separations that we find all over the place. It does more than that of course, and goes on to define what it is that makes them different; or conversely what makes them the same. It is why the concepts of mathematics are so peculiarly essential to the modern sciences in almost all their forms.

This idea of ‘separateness’ is unavoidable, a consequence of the nature of the creation we actually find. I believe it is Sin; or more precisely I believe it to be what we call sin. And when you consider the effects of what we commonly call sins (as opposed to sinfulness), it is precisely this sort of separateness that it generates. It separates us from those we think we love; it divides us from other people around us, setting one against another; it sets us over against the inanimate creation, against animals, against the forces of nature. Especially it sets us against and separates us from God. Yet God is the source of Being, and not least of our being.

Over against that separation there is the nature of the creation, love made actual. And the nature of love is to dissolve separateness; it is inseparable from it. It is when love enters into the scene that the otherness of created things becomes a oneness, and more; the nature of the process of creation that evolution represents is to make that love more and more actual. Separateness is contrary to the purposes of creation, contrary to the purposes of the Creator, to the purpose and intention of God himself, to the very nature of the processes of the natural created order itself. Yet that separation is inevitably an inescapable ingredient in the created.

It does it seems to me two things. It makes sin a frightening thing that attacks the very foundations of being itself. It also makes the unity of love an equally inescapable, but more wonderful consequence.

Separateness of course demands healing, demands some means to bridge the gap. In the world as we experience it love is that bridge. Nor is love any less the bridge when the separateness is between Man the creature and God his Creator. But a bridge between man who must know in order to love, and the transcendent God in the otherness of the infinite beyond our knowing? How can love bridge a gap of that kind and magnitude? It is beyond reason!

The Church calls that bridging operation Redemption. It has at its centre something called Atonement, a rather complex and hard to understand set of ideas in which sacrifice in one sense or another figures largely. It seems to me, however, that there is another way to come at this, one more familiar to us.

When we love someone and fall out with them, we find exactly the same problem in rebuilding the relationship. You see, what a relationship consists of is a one-ness that exists between two people who love. You add one banana to one banana and get two bananas. When you add a banana to an orange you get two - things? But when you add one person to another person by means of love, you get in a very real sort of way one person. Not a single individual, nor even a single personality. But nevertheless a singleness that in some way we don’t understand goes beyond all their two-nesses. Married people find it quite often; soldiers in battle and people caught up in great danger find it. And people who love God find it. It may be something that we can’t explain, but it is something that everyone, or almost everyone, experiences in one way or another.

I believe that Redemption is like that. And more than just similar to, or like in the sense of an analogy, it is that sort of ‘becoming one with’ in a relationship that has love at its core, as its cement, and more than its cement, its building brick. It is that that Jesus accomplished at the first Good Friday and consummated at the first Easter.

Traditionally I suppose, the crucifixion is seen, by many Church people if not by theologians, as that ‘redemption’ in its entirety. I suspect that is a somewhat narrow concept. For what is at stake, it seems to me, is ‘knowability’, that is to say ‘capable of being known’. What we know is created things, the creation, creation within the limits of one-ness as we understand it. But God, because he is beyond that created limitation, is unknowable according to the rules under which we have of necessity to function. Therefore, ‘redemption’ includes creating that knowability. It is God becoming limited as we are limited, for that is the only way in which we are able to know. It means that redemption started in a stable at Bethlehem, in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus, when Herod was King in Judea, and Quirinius was governor of Syria. And it was brought to fulfilment on a hill outside Jerusalem thirty-three years later. And vary the historical ‘facts’ how you like the outcome is the same.

There will be, I do not doubt, those who will be convinced by this time that I have given up any belief in Sin or Salvation or anything else. Not so. To be separated from, to be at odds with one I love is excruciatingly painful, for me as for anyone. That is the consequence of sin. More, it is sin, in every sense of the word, to first of all be in that situation and second to allow it to continue. It is self-destructive. I believe that to love the self first and foremost is why it is often hard to see that. Jesus demonstrates the way so forcibly and so clearly that he is himself the way. He has not only given himself to me at a point in history some 1950 years ago but daily. Forgive me for saying ‘me’ in that way, but I wish to make the point that you are also a ‘me’.

It is that giving of the self that creates the new breakthrough from man to God, that makes possible a ‘knowability’ that before was impossible. The knowability, the ability to know in every sense of the word that we can comprehend, is given to us in the terms we understand, within, as I have expressed it, the limits of the one-ness of the ONE of our world. Jesus is God expressed and knowable in those terms. Therefore the Incarnation at Bethlehem, all the incidents of his life, growing up, learning, finding out about himself, putting that knowledge to use, teaching and suffering and dying, and rising again in a way that makes his living something that we can experience one, two, ten thousand, a million years later, these are all of them the essential ingredients that make our sort of one-ness, the sort of one-ness that we are capable of experiencing.

It seems to me, that unless that experience is one that we can experience now and every day, then there is inevitably an emptiness in our life. The other great sacrament of the Church, the Communion, is the means, a principal means, of accomplishing that daily experience. In it Jesus presents himself to every suppliant at the rail, by means of the hands of him who delivers the bread and the wine, into our hands; our hands that have been soiled and dirtied by the things we must do daily in the process of living, things we know to be good and things that we know to be far from good though we do not know what else we can do.

But it cannot be limited to that sacrament. The experience must surely be of the presence of Jesus. That presence is expressed, as is the love relationship, in all the other ways and people with whom we enjoy it. Where that is in a joining together in a unity, so too is this one. Just as they are enjoyed in a living in one another so is this one. As those whom we love in every day terms never really leave us, nor does he. The church uses a peculiar word for that sort of unity; indwelling. I believe that it is a word that not only applies to the personal union but to the collective union too, the union that constitutes the church.

The surrender of the self to God and the receiving of the self-surrender of God in the person of Jesus, given its deepest and fullest expression in the sacrament of the Communion of his body and blood, is what salvation means. It is for that reason an eternal event, extending beyond the present world of becoming to that which lies beyond. It is also, it seems to me, the precondition of the completion and fulfilling of what has been called ‘redemption’, the healing of the separation which is sin, which ‘sins’ (i.e. sinful acts) amongst other things, cause. Without that healing, self-evidently, fulfilment of the love union cannot take place.

Baptism, washing in water, the principal initiation rite of the church, has from the beginning been seen as the proper and indeed the only effective gateway. Of course the whole concept of a ‘sacrament’ is somewhat complex, and none more so than this one. The symbolism is obscure to many modern minds, with its ideas of death, rescue and new life.

The question is, does it actually do this to the person, the self who is baptised, washed? When one observes the results, in terms of children and adults and how they differ from unbaptised selves, one is hard put to it to determine in what respect they differ, if at all. Perhaps we are really expecting not just too much but rather the wrong thing.

If Baptism is not something done but the guarantee of something to be done, then what we are to look for is not immediate but rather in the future. Let me suggest a crude analogy. When you buy a washing machine you get a piece of paper with ‘GUARANTEE’ written at the top of it. It does not say that the machine is faultless. It is absolutely worthless. You could paper the wall with them and be not one whit worse off. Until something goes wrong with your washing machine. The moment you invoke it the guarantee becomes valuable, and things begin to happen. If baptism is such a guarantee, the question then becomes, what has to be done to invoke it, make it effective?

Obviously just words are not enough. It is not sufficient to say ‘Lord, Lord’. The offering of the self on terms that relinquish it to God, to be accepted (or rejected) by him and a readiness to abide by the outcome till death. That is its essential characteristic. Then instantly the 'GUARANTEE' of baptism is activated in all its power, and in all its fullness. Immediately ‘redemption’ is actualised, made real. And the evidence of it is to be seen in‘forgiveness’,

The nature of forgiveness is not that sin is ‘forgiven’, nor that it is set aside, nor even that it is forgotten, but rather that it is as if it had never been. What was once sin is sin no longer: what once separated and divided, no longer separates or divides, neither from God nor from our fellow men. It opens the way to a new and more universal love union with both God and them.

If there is one thing about the Gospel Passion narrative that I have always found hard to accept as true it is the extraordinary attitude of the Romans. Their behaviour seems to me to be a mixture of good-humoured contempt and supine indifference. One might expect that of some people. But Romans? The idea is to me ludicrous.

Unless the whole episode was to them one of no significance, a paltry brouhaha over a bagatelle, it is unbelievable. The soldiers do not act like men facing a crisis. They jocularly play games with the poor unfortunate in their hands; they knock him about in mock fight; they poke him in the face and put him in fancy clothes to wind him up. And Pilate. What of Pilate? According to Christian tradition he is a weakling, a vacillating and self-serving political clown manipulated by an unscrupulous clique in the Jewish hierarchy. But earlier in the Gospel he is said to have put down a minor uprising with considerable brutality and a ruthless chopping of heads pour encourager les autres. If he was the clown he has been made out to be, I am sure his fellow Romans would not have stood calmly by and watched him doing it. They hardly bear that sort of thing calmly; domination of weak political favourites, assassination, usurpation were more characteristic of the system.

No, it seems to me that the absence of any significant mention in the historical record of this momentous occasion tells us more than it leaves out. This was an insignificant event; insignificant not in the historical context but in the social and more particularly the political sense. Those Romans behaved quite characteristically. They did not take the threat of a Jewish uprising seriously. Forty years later, when they did, they acted very differently.

So what were the Jews up to? Were the crowds who proclaimed Jesus as Messiah really as menacing to their position as they made out? If they numbered many thousands of excited pilgrims to the Passover Feast (as is suggested by statements that the numbers of Passover lambs slaughtered on these occasions was of the order of a quarter million at ten persons each) the implication cannot be but that of an impending riot of astronomical proportions. The Romans could hardly ignore it and play games.

Jesus whole life was one in which obscurity and humility were central to his whole way of proceeding. The essential nature of it was to work within a small group inside the social structures of the time. Falling foul of an equally small group within the ecclesiastical establishment (or for that matter any other establishment, like for instance St. Thomas of Canterbury and King Henry) was ever a possibility. This episode bears the marks for me of a bunch of wild activists who got out of hand and stirred up a hornet’s nest. Was it part of God’s plan? No, but it was part of the process of self-surrender, of self-giving.

From last supper to the empty tomb this was a low-key affair of little or no significance at the time. That explains the confusion, disillusion and dismay experienced by the disciples; until that is they realised as a result of the resurrection that his ‘presence’ was suddenly something very real and altogether different. The Romans dismissed it as insignificant; the Jews thought it was all over. But it wasn’t.

What this insignificant incident did was to change forever the culture of the Roman Empire and with it the culture of the West, a change that to this day distinguishes it from that of the East and the South. Both those latter have of course been modified by the impact of Western culture, by colonisation, by military conquest, by trade and commerce, but that has not stuck because its evident truth is clear to them. It has stuck because it works. It teaches that poverty, disease, famine, war, all the ills that afflict mankind (and indeed the rest of the creation) are curable, not by magic, nor by divine intervention, nor by the traditional methods handed down from the past, but by work, which is not the same as ‘labour’; by the exploitation of knowledge and understanding, by the use of resources, by a constructive, cooperative joining together in concerted action by human beings together with the rest of the created order; by means of the mechanisms of industry, trade and commerce, by education, by the sharing of knowledge.

From the decline and eventual collapse of the Roman Empire till now the Church has with an extraordinary persistence resisted these ideas. Even the convulsion of the Renaissance and Reformation did not do more than engender a temporary and superficial acknowledgement of their validity. The continuing conflict between the Aid Agencies and the International Monetary Fund bears witness to that.

Many will remember the story of the old woman who was cross-eyed and went to work in her kitchen "with one eye on t’cookpot and t’other up the chimney". The Church has to be like that, working with one eye in the pragmatic affairs of the world and the other on God.

The idea of chosen-ness as a characteristic of members of the church (as of the Jews) enjoys a long (and not always honourable) history. For choice by definition also includes the idea of exclusion, not-choosing. And those who are not chosen are by that excluded. Furthermore, if choice exercised by God rather than by us is part of the concept, I do not think the idea that God rejects some and accepts others on the basis that men and women have no choice in the matter is one many of us would find in accord with our ideas about God. So if that is not what we mean, what is it, and how is ‘choice’ to be understood?

It seems to me that the answer lies in the idea of the nature of redemption and salvation as mutual surrender in a love union. If that is so then the choice on both sides is a positive one, in the sense that we usually understand the words. God invariably chooses positively for every single one of us. When we so choose (whatever our motives, or on whatever terms and by whatever words we express the choice) then the union is in place, and as complete as it can be for us in the situation we happen to be in.

When that union, whatever it is that you understand it to be, is made, then you are a fully paid up member of the Church, the ‘people’ of God, a child of the Father, a member of Christ, an inheritor of the kingdom, even if you have never been baptised.

Are then those who though baptised find no sense of union in their relationship, therefore not any of these things? Are they no further along than those who are not baptised and see themselves as seekers rather than finders? Or is the difference of the kind that they have at least appreciated the value of the ‘guarantee’?

That relationship of mutual self-surrender, of indwelling in a love union, is what makes the community of those who engage in it, or who seek to engage in it, the Church. Because Jesus is the other party to our engagement in it, the whole community is HOLY.

The holiness of the Church is one of its four essential characteristics, three of which are specifically mentioned in the creeds. Its holiness consists not in it being in any sense separate from other people, or set aside for a purpose in some way sacred as opposed to secular, nor yet as selected out of an otherwise condemned world for the purpose of saving either itself or even the world. It is holy by virtue of the Indwelling presence of God in the love union. It means something else too. Because God in the person of Jesus is indwelling in the Church, its members individually and collectively, and since those members and hence the Church are necessarily in the world, the Church is God present in the world.

The nature of the relationship between the members of the Church and God is or ought to be (in as much it is what the seeker seeks) that of Indwelling, shorthand for ‘engaging in a love union’. It is I suppose possible to engage in a love union and exclude all others from it, though my experience and probably yours is that when it is a real love union, whether in marriage or any other, it has a habit of spilling over into other relationships as well so that they too become a species of love union. It is hard to avoid loving people who obviously love. It is no less so in the relationship between those, who as members of the Church are sharers in the indwelling relationship of Jesus toward them, with those who are outside that relationship. It is not simply a matter of orders from higher up. It is built into the nature of the relationship. How?

The relationship depends upon the Incarnation. Incarnation is the mechanism by which God is made knowable, by which he shares in our createdness so that we can see, recognise, know him, and so love him in the same terms that we understand love. By it he is made actual in a sense that he cannot be actual without it. That actuality is only knowable in the love union with him. That is so for us who express it in membership of the Church, in all its fellowship, worship, sacraments and so on, and it is equally so for those who do not engage in that love relationship. If he cannot be actual for them without it, how are they to come at it at all?

Jackie Pullinger, the missioner to the poor and destitute in the Walled City of Kowloon in Hong Kong, put it excruciatingly sharply. "When I first arrived," she says, "I would stop people in the street and tell them ‘Jesus loves you’. They would look at me blankly and move on. I soon realised that just telling them was not enough. I had to be Jesus." Jackie Pullinger went to Hong Kong because it was the furthest port she could reach on a one-way ticket with what little money she possessed. She arrived with eight pounds in her pocket. She had the support of no church; she was regarded with suspicion by those on the ground. She was in no sense that the church recognised ‘ordained’. Yet ‘she had to be Jesus.’

What I think she meant was this. By incarnation Jesus is made actual in this world of becoming. By his indwelling he is made actual in us, in the same sort of way that someone I (or you) love is made actual in you and I when we meet other people. They may not even be aware of it but that person is present in my presence none the less. Immanence is perhaps the word that comes somewhere close to expressing it. It is what indwelling makes happen.

It is a concept that carries an important consequence. The world is not one we can get away from, nor are we to lure others from it. Far from it.

Jackie Pullinger I am sure sees herself as ‘sent’ to Hong Kong and to the drug addicts and criminal poor of the Walled City. She sees herself as ‘being Jesus’ in that unbelievably awful place, an agent of the ‘Apostolic Church’, the ‘sent’ Church. I dare say that she has a better grasp of what that means than I could ever hope to have. Yet I believe that for the church to be ‘immanent’ in the material, physical world is not quite the same as being ‘sent’, nor is to ‘be immanent’ what it is sent to do. It is there to do more than just be Jesus, as if having, as it were, ‘got’ him there, we can leave him to get on with it, our part confined to keeping him there. Immanence does the one; it is ‘work’ that does the other.

‘Work’ is one of the great ideas that came out of the Reformation. It is why those areas of the world that are the offspring of the Reformation, northwest Europe and the North American continent especially, are so notably effective in bettering the condition of the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the outcast. The church can no longer pretend that ‘work’ is more proper to slaves than to free men, or that some work is good and others bad. As the Roman Empire was falling apart the church was proclaiming that all science was futile — it made no contribution to the salvation of souls. In part it was why the Empire collapsed. The thinkers and philosophers of the Reformation saw ‘work’ as ‘world building’. And so it is. It is building the world. The work of the Apostolic Church is to build it as the actualisation of God’s love, to make that love not only more actual but to move it towards completeness, to build with, as it were, one eye on the cook pot and t’other up the chimney.

Of course even work without any concept of God or of creation as the actualisation of his love, whether it is by men who think and consciously create, or by the natural world following its blind way (if it is as blind as we might think), all this is world-building too. That is after all what a self- creating world does. But to do it knowingly, with the vision of the Divine Love before the eyes, the vision of what the poet of the English Revolution, John Milton, described as ‘answering his great idea’, this is the work of the Church Immanent, the Holy church that is possessed of the indwelling presence of Jesus in the love union.

The ‘sent’ church is sent not only to be an advocate, not just to be an ambassador, nor yet a herald. Nor is it just to pick up broken pieces, nor mend the diseased and wounded and abandoned. It is not to prevent things going wrong nor to compel a retreat from wrongdoing, nor to punish (or proclaim punishment, which is the same thing) for wrong doers. These may well be part of its work, but they are a subsidiary and consequential part. Its work is conscious and calculated world building, the transformation of the self-creating universe from an unconscious process into a conscious one, not for just some of it but for all of it.

more than just be Jesus, as if having, as it were, ‘got’ him there, we can leave him to get on with it, our part confined to keeping him there. Immanence does the one; it is ‘work’ that does the other.

‘Work’ is one of the great ideas that came out of the Reformation. It is why those areas of the world that are the offspring of the Reformation, northwest Europe and the North American continent especially, are so notably effective in bettering the condition of the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the outcast. The church can no longer pretend that ‘work’ is more proper to slaves than to free men, or that some work is good and others bad. As the Roman Empire was falling apart the church was proclaiming that all science was futile — it made no contribution to the salvation of souls. In part it was why the Empire collapsed. The thinkers and philosophers of the Reformation saw ‘work’ as ‘world building’. And so it is. It is building the world. The work of the Apostolic Church is to build it as the actualisation of God’s love, to make that love not only more actual but to move it towards completeness, to build with, as it were, one eye on the cook pot and t’other up the chimney.

Of course even work without any concept of God or of creation as the actualisation of his love, whether it is by men who think and consciously create, or by the natural world following its blind way (if it is as blind as we might think), all this is world-building too. That is after all what a self- creating world does. But to do it knowingly, with the vision of the Divine Love before the eyes, the vision of what the poet of the English Revolution, John Milton, described as ‘answering his great idea’, this is the work of the Church Immanent, the Holy church that is possessed of the indwelling presence of Jesus in the love union.

The ‘sent’ church is sent not only to be an advocate, not just to be an ambassador, nor yet a herald. Nor is it just to pick up broken pieces, nor mend the diseased and wounded and abandoned. It is not to prevent things going wrong nor to compel a retreat from wrongdoing, nor to punish (or proclaim punishment, which is the same thing) for wrong doers. These may well be part of its work, but they are a subsidiary and consequential part. Its work is conscious and calculated world building, the transformation of the self-creating universe from an unconscious process into a conscious one, not for just some of it but for all of it.

The idea of a ‘universal’ church is not the sole property of its ‘Catholic’ denomination. Anglicans and all the others too are catholic, and indeed ‘Catholic’.

If we look back over what this little book has had to say we can see why. The human race is ‘God’s love made actual’. So too is the rest of creation. The human race has become what it is, in a becoming world that is ‘love made actual’. The one-ness of the creation consists in that perception. It is that creation that is the object of the saving and redeeming process that God in Jesus the knowable God is engaged in, in his indwelling relationship with men in the Church, at once Holy by his indwelling, Immanent in the created world, and Sent (Apostolic) to be in a special and conscious way among the world builders.

Such a church embraces all men, and more than just all men to include all things. For the world we are engaged in building is not just human society, however much that may be our pressing concern at any particular point in time. The concept of the ‘stewardship’ of humanity towards the environment, animal life, space and the outer world, and the rest is modern, gaining in prominence in only very recent years, and still only at the very dawning edge of its significance. Yet it seems to me that it is a profound revelation of the proper place of the universal church at the growing edge of a world of becoming. Even more than that it speaks to me of a continuity that goes beyond the visible and material world of immediate experience.

We are coming to see, I think, that we do not yet understand what life is and what material existence is. As the researches of modern science push the frontiers ever further back, we realise more and more how ‘knowability’ conditions our perceptions, how much there may be just beyond our present reach. I believe that there is a continuity between this life as we experience it and the ‘next’ one beyond the ‘dissolution of the biological mechanism’ we call death, and that in that world what keeps some out and lets others in is love; and the ability to love; and knowing what love is. There can be no more chilling hell than to be without love in a world where you only have relationships of love and nothing else.

There is a chance for everyone, even the most profoundly lost, to discover love, even in that cold, empty wilderness, where there stands in the far distance, dark against the sky, a tiny black crooked stump of a tree that spreads a twisted branch to right and left. That distorted, twisted, blackened stump is the last, residual remnant of love that remains in even the most damned of us all, the love that was made actual in our creation. So that in the end, in the infinite love and patience of God, all men and all things come together in the totality of his kingdom.

FROM GROUND ZERO

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