ABC: I remember people sometimes say about the Church, especially the Church of England. I remember one of my students saying, It’s still a place where you put the stuff that won’t go anywhere else. And I find that quite a moving definition of the Church because it suggests our society still has a great deal of belief, hope, need, confusion, which a lot of our social life simply does not give any vehicles for dealing with. It’s got to go somewhere. And I don’t think that’s dead yet.<\/p>\n
IH: What strikes me is that we have quite a conspicuous secular drive at the moment. We also have a fundamental drive. So people are driven to be believing in absolutely everything, or nothing at all and being fiercely proud of it. My entire relationship with the Church of England was based is that it didn’t question too closely what I believed in. I was told by someone I was in a long tradition of CofE agnosticism, which is basically the old Flanders and Swann joke: Religion? Don’t know. I’ll put you down as CofE. And I wonder if the Church is not making it clear enough that it is still there in the middle, that you don’t have to be an American evangelical, you do not have to be a Muslim fundamentalist, you do not have to be Richard Dawkins. At the Edinburgh festival this year there were at least four comedians selling out on the basis that Genesis isn’t literal. Extraordinary perception by these young men. They’ve caught up with 19th century theology. That does suggest the Church is slightly failing to say, do you know anything about us any more? It isn’t that.<\/p>\n
ABC: That is one of the anxieties that many people in the Church feel, that a period of cultural legacy of knowing a bit about it has vanished and that therefore what people know is what high-profile headlines say and what the conflicts communicate. This is where the Church of England in particular does have quite a complicated balancing act. The Church as someone said decades ago, has to be something, has to be itself. The question is how to be itself with integrity in a way that doesn’t barricade the doors. I think understanding that the language of our theology the language of our hymns the symbolism of our worship is invitation before it’s anything else, it’s not a set of conditions before you come through the door… In the world of the imagination, of the arts, time was when the Christian faith was bound in with a lot of that. You couldn’t really say that now, easily. And yet that’s where a lot of people find the depth they want, the dimensionality they want.’<\/p>\n