March 2025

 

When I returned to St. Saviour’s in 2014 after perambulating around various churches for about 40 years, I found that the then parish mantra was ‘Live: pray: think’ and only last month I read a rather appealing comment in the newspaper ‘Treat Christianity as a living intellectual tradition’.

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I suspect that many denominations (and their associated clergy) are wary of encouraging an intellectual challenge to the traditions of faith: some denominations expect a total adherence to biblical teaching (St. Paul expects women to keep their heads covered in church) or to church tradition (the church teaches all truth in faith and morals). In our currently much denigrated Church of England we should, I think, be mindful of the seventeenth-century Anglican Richard Hooker’s statement in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity of 1597 that ‘the church is founded upon scripture, tradition, and reason’.

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A handsome trinity indeed – and I like the concept that we should treat Christianity as ‘a living intellectual tradition’ as encouraged by Hooker rather than discarding our brains at the church door. The church must engage with contemporary society and its evolving morality if it is not to decline into oblivion as a relic of a bygone era, an institution based on literature composed two millennia ago and upon the opinions of scholarly clerics of the Renaissance whose world view was tempered by the times and seasons in which they lived.

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I cannot approach Christianity without seeing it as ‘a living intellectual tradition’: an intellectual engagement with matters of faith may certainly lead to moments of doubt, of liminality, but without weighing our anchors for a voyage of discovery how can we hope to reach the shore of our eternal destiny?

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‘Live: pray: think’: is there a finer rule for Lent?

 

Deacon Douglas MacMillan

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The Collect

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God of compassion,

whose Son Jesus Christ, the child of Mary,

shared the life of a home in Nazareth,

and on the cross drew the whole human family to himself:

strengthen us in our daily living

that in joy and in sorrow

we may know the power of your presence

to bind together and to heal;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

Amen.