CKNW Editorial
for April 21, 2000

Traditionally on Good Friday I deal, at editorial time, with my own thoughts on religion and today will be no exception. In so doing I will, no doubt, make many people angry and I will get lots of suggestions on how I can become a better Christian. No doubt many of those suggestions will be valid.

I was born and baptized a Christian ... many long years ago in Grace Hospital and St Pauls in the West End respectively. Since that time I've been on quite a religious roller coaster all the way from being a choirboy at St Mary's in Kerrisdale through a long bout of agnosticism to today when I am a regular Anglican communicant again. A substantial part, though far from all, of that decision was my rejection of the notion that we all got here by billions upon billions of chance happenings. Moreover, even if we did, it all started with something and where did that something come from. Just as I can’t answer the question who made God? the scientists are not able to tell us where whatever we came from itself came from and if it was an explosion where did the combustion compatible atmosphere come from. In coming back to the church I have not been reborn and in most senses it has been on my terms ... especially in the sense that I decided that I would put my own interpretation on many things.

One of the things that put me off church for so many years is that I simply could not accept what the church has done over the centuries in Jesus name. With some help from my priest, Lou Rivers, I came to see two churches – the broad church of Christ and the "corporate" church which man has constructed and is now divided into thousands of pieces. Clearly it wasn't Christ's church that beheaded or burned at the stake or put to the sword those considered heretics. It was not Christ's church that the Pope apologized to the Jews for ... it was the corporate church in its various manifestations.

I have come to accept the corporate church as Christ's clubhouse - a place to meet and worship - not the exclusive arbiter of what he meant. The second decision I came to was that Christ's words are contained in the four gospels and that it is Christ's words, not the interpretation of those by others, that I should pay attention to. This very much simplified things in that his message is very clear - though the message itself is a difficult one to obey. And this is not to say that I reject the writings of men like Paul or think that the Old Testament does not contain much Godly wisdom. I simply hold that Christianity is the word of Christ and that it can be boiled down to his two great commandments to love God and to love thy neighbour as thyself ... which is three commandments really because the second means to love both your neighbour and yourself.

Now ... when I thought of that I thought of two things. Simple as those directions are to understand they are almost impossible for mere mortals to obey. Every possible effort must be made to even come close. Therefore I concluded that God has given us a very difficult job simply through Jesus' teachings and we'll be assessed, in due course, as to how we did, not whether or not we took the Bible literally. The second thing that occurred to me was that Jesus was speaking to ordinary people, not theologians. He spoke the people's language and his parables were easy to understand. He did not envisage all the sacred rites by which many churches are governed and that much of the mysticism and jargon that surrounds Christian liturgies are little more that huckster hype dreamt up by the Church's early traveling salesmen. There is nothing wrong with it – I am scarcely the 17th century puritan bent upon destroying icons and banning ceremonies. I only say that for my personal faith, at this point anyway, I do not include most of what the corporate church has made part of its liturgy. I'm not sure, for example, I accept a virgin birth or a bodily resurrection. I don't deny them - they simply are not central to my faith which considers that Christ's message was not about ceremonies or liturgies but about loving God, others and yourself and that the path to redemption was following Him, not necessarily the very human, mostly men, who interpreted His word. In fact, to make the shock complete to more fundamentalist Christians than I, I declare my faith in the words Elizabeth I stated for herself when she said "There is only one Lord Jesus Christ - the rest is a dispute over trifles".

The foregoing was not intended to be a statement of any fundamental truths nor an assertion of any sort - it's only a statement of where my faith has taken me, as food for thought on this Holy of Holiest of seasons in the Christian calendar.