I am convinced that rushing around to produce a new set of parliamentary rules and procedures isn't the whole answer by any means. This is a moral crisis not a legal or constitutional one. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn was deported to the West in 1974 after his Soviet imprisonment he didn't experience freedom but a different enslavement. ‘You have forgotten God' he told us. We didn't want to hear. The loss of faith in God goes alongside a loss of faith in our public institutions and perhaps a loss of faith in ourselves. Our need isn't simply for new laws or different rules and procedures but a new heart and a new spirit. That's what today, the feast of Pentecost, is about. God gives us his Spirit to live within us.
This contrast between law and spirit is found in the Christian tradition itself. Last Monday I took part, as I usually do, in the National Pilgrimage at Walsingham. Thousands were present for the open air Eucharist, sermon and procession through the streets. As usual there was the group of protestors who come doggedly each year to denounce all that we are doing. They consider devotion to the Mother of Our Lord blasphemous and unbiblical. It must be strange for the police to see one group of Christians noisily condemning another group who continue praying and singing in reply. Maurice Wood, my noted evangelical predecessor, was the first Bishop of Norwich to go to the National Pilgrimage. Much to the surprise of the protestors, he gave them some of his own bible tracts. He told them that Walsingham pilgrims all believed the Bible and loved Jesus. I fear the protestors didn't believe him.
This illustrates vividly a clash between two different approaches to Christianity. One believes the Church to be the continuation of the incarnation, the Body of Christ, given the Holy Spirit to lead her into all truth. The Holy Spirit guides the Church and develops her life and faith. The other approach locates the Spirit's inspiration almost wholly in the words of scripture. It is a religion of the book. I've noticed the protestors often hold their Bibles aloft as they shout. I'm reminded of an incident in the life of the theologian Paul Tillich. After a lecture, a man held a bible aloft at the back of the room and asked ‘Mr Tillich, do you believe this book to be the Word of God?' Quick thinking, Tillich replied ‘When you hold it, I'm not so sure. Whent it holds you, it is.'
All Christians consider the same scriptures to be the word of God. The dividing line seems to be over what the Holy Spirit may reveal to the faithful. Some Christians do not believe that there can be any development in doctrine. Others, the majority of the Christian world, do and take this from the Scriptures themselves. Christ promises that the Spirit, the advocate, the one who will come in his name, will lead his followers into all truth. The Holy Spirit disturbs, changes, and moves us on.
A couple of months before I was born Pope Pius XII did something which even then took the Christian world by surprise. He issued an Apostolic Constitution called Munificentissimus Deus. This proclaimed to the world that it was a matter of divinely revealed truth that the Blessed Virgin Mary ‘having completed her earthly life was in body and soul assumed into heavenly glory'. It was the Pope speaking infallibly as the Vicar of Christ, something Popes do remarkably infrequently. For good measure the Pope declared that to deny this truth would incur the wrath of Almightly God and the Holy Apostles. In other words, to believe this doctrine was necessary to salvation.
This authoritative development of Christian tradition wasn't the consequence of any scientific research, historical evidence or biblical criticism. The evidence was in the popular devotion of the Roman Catholic faithful all over the world. The belief of the faithful and the authority of the Pope were enough in themselves to add to the core doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. The Orthodox Churches of the East objected. They celebrated what they called the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary but didn't think this doctrine needed to be defined. Anglicans objected that a pious opinion among some of the faithful had now become a barrier to unity. Protestants and rationalists thought it was all incredibly silly. You couldn't make something true simply by declaring it to be so.
There was one unlikely defender of Pope Pius XII. He was the son of a liberal protestant pastor in Switzerland. Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytic psychology, the developer of the concept of the collective unconscious.
What excited Jung was that the Pope's pronouncement was a sign that Christian faith was still developing and growing. Everything dies if it does not live and grow. His observation was that the Christianity he knew had become mute. He wrote ‘the fault lies not in it as it is set down in the scriptures, but solely in us, who have not developed it further and instead have suppressed any such attempts'. Jung thought this was all to do with our fear of the imagination, coupled with an equal fear of adventure into the unknown, something he encountered on his analyst's couch every day.
John Drury, once a Canon of this Cathedral Church, wrote about this in one of his books. He also drew attention to one of Jung's patients who had been a theologian. Jung wrote about the recurring dream from which this patient suffered. He dreamed that he was standing on a slope looking towards a deeply wooded valley in the middle of which there was a lake. Something had previously prevented him wanting to go there. Now he longed to get to the lake. As he approached it, the atmosphere changed and a gust of wind made the waters choppy. Whenever this happened he awoke with a cry of terror.
Jung was surprised that the theologian didn't recognise the images in his dream. The wind ‘moves over the face of the waters' in Genesis. It's the Creator's spirit. The wind ‘troubles the waters' in the miracle at the pool of Bethesda. Jung thought this man needed to be blown about by the wind of God's spirit to give him a new confidence. He was trapped by his fear.
The promise of the Holy Spirit is always that fear will be taken away. That's how those first believers in the resurrection had the divine energy to preach the gospel to all the world. If they were fearful or timid we wouldn't be here this morning. It is astonishing that such an unlikely and ill prepared group should be so changed themselves by the Spirit of God that others caught the spirit. They weren't given a constitution for mission, or fresh rules to observe. God's spirit fired up and claimed their hearts.
How may this speak not simply to us as individual Christians but to our wider society too? One of the problems of our society is that there are too many rules, too many laws, too many regulations. They render people fearful, resentful and angry all at the same time. Coercion into good behaviour cramps our spirit and dulls our conscience. What's needed is a new spirit within us. The spirit which leads us into all truth is the spirit of love. The Christian tradition isn't about a book of rules for human life. It's about God's spirit planted in us, a spirit of neighbour love, of corporate obligation, of eating around a common table, of generosity rather than rampant acquisition. If living within the rules or under the law was enough there would have been no need for Jesus Christ. Perhaps in these confusing times we may be rediscovering a fundamental human need. At Pentecost we pray that God's new spirit may anoint our own lives and renew our nation too.
The Rt Revd Graham James
Bishop of Norwich