If the Christian Way is to continue into the future as a viable path of faith by which we can walk, it must be one which allows us to be fully aware of the kind of world we find ourselves living in. What are the chief obstacles which prevent it at present from fulfilling that function? They consist of those aspects of belief and ritual practice which continue to reflect the view of reality, which prevailed in the ancient or medieval worlds but which has now become obsolete.

To help us determine just what they are, let us start by sketching how we have come to see the universe today, and how we have come to understand the human condition. Then we shall turn to those elements in traditional Christianity which are in conflict with that general picture.

There is a body of general knowledge of the world and ourselves which we all share today to a greater or less extent. It is this which has been responsible for the radical shift in human consciousness already referred to. It is built on the pioneering work of such people as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and hosts of others, of which these are but a few notable examples. As a result of the accumulation of reliable knowledge which is based on their work, there is a common view of reality which we in the Western world already basically share. Moreover, through general education and the mass media, the rest of humankind is coming to share it also.

It is becoming universally acknowledged that we live on a tiny planet we call Earth. We revolve round a star we call the sun and this sun is only one of billions of stars in the star cluster we call the Milky Way. Our star cluster in turn is only one of billions of such star clusters we call nebulae. Thus the universe we find ourselves living in is so vast that our little human minds cannot really comprehend it. For the practical purposes of daily life we can afford to ignore the universe beyond this planet and commonly do so. But when we make belief statements about the universe as a whole, as our forbears were prone to do, we must be careful not to ignore that immense and mysterious universe. Much of what has been traditionally affirmed of God as Creator and Provider was tuned to a relatively tiny universe and becomes far less credible in relation to the vast space-time universe in which we now find ourselves.

Out of sheer curiosity we continue to ask the question of how the universe came to exist and whether it had a beginning. But since the evidence now indicates that the universe is at least fifteen billion years old that makes it so old that our minds cannot grasp that time scale either. Whether the universe had a beginning or not has become a question much less relevant to our short existence here. It has become a scientific and academic question rather than a religious or existential one.

Now let us turn to the Earth. From the same commonly accepted body of knowledge we learn that the earth is over four billion years old and there has probably been life of some form on this planet for three billion years. Common knowledge now leads us to believe that we human beings have evolved from lower and less complex living forms over aeons of time. We humans are very distantly related to all other living forms on this planet. We form part of the very thin spherical layer of life which surrounds the earth, which is now called the biosphere. We humans finding ourselves to be living organisms, one species only of innumerable species stretching from micro-organisms to mammals, all of whom are mutually interdependent in a complex ecological field of life. A very long evolutionary process lies behind the physiology of our bodies, some 98% of which we share with other species in the ape family.

But what really constitutes our humanity, what most definitely distinguishes us from all other earthly organisms is not so much the physiology of our bodies as the language and culture into which we are born and which enable us to become human. All this too has slowly evolved over a period of at last 50,000 years. It is this evolving culture which enables us to ask questions of who we are and why we are and what is our future.

This general picture of how we see the world and understand ourselves forms a common body of knowledge which underpins modern culture. But this body of knowledge has only become generally known in the last 150 years. How different it is from that which obtained in Western culture up until the middle of the 19th century. Until that time the universe was conceived as relatively small, assumed to be only a few thousand years old, and thought to have been made by a divine creator, who at creation had designed all creatures, including humans, according to a fixed pattern. The traditional view of reality had taken shape in the ancient and/or medieval worlds and still seemed pretty convincing to most people in the West. It is now out of kilter with the current body of knowledge.

The new form of human consciousness has been leading us, often reluctantly, out of what we now see to be an altogether too narrow and confined view of reality. We are forced to acknowledge that the culture we have inherited from the past has been only one of many. Just as the human species has become divided into different races with different skin colours, so there have evolved different cultures, each with its own way of understanding reality.

Because we can only become human by being nurtured within a particular human culture we become products of that culture and naturally find it to be most congenial. We all tend to be cultural chauvinists, who find our own culture to be the best and the truest. So the cultural transition which the growing body of common knowledge is forcing us to take is proving a slow and painful one, as we come to terms with the fact that none of the past cultures, including our own, can claim to be the one and only final truth.

Fundamentalists of all religious faiths and cultures respond to the new and more comprehensive view of reality simply by rejecting it. When something is found to be psychologically very unsettling, there is an understandable attraction to the comfort and support provided by sheer familiarity of past tradition. As the ancient Hebrews, struggling through the rigours of the wilderness en route to the Promised Land, often longed to return to the certainties of Egypt even if it did mean slavery, so they prefer the apparent certainties of the past even if it does mean shutting one's eyes to new realities.

Christian fundamentalists feel confident in rejecting the new body of knowledge by taking their stand on the Bible which, if divinely revealed, must present the only true view of reality. The Bible, therefore, makes a useful starting point for us to examine, one by one, the most important aspects of traditional Christianity which have become the roadblocks barring the Christian Way from going forward.

It speaks volumes for the literary content of the Bible that for many centuries it supplied, among other things, such a convincing picture of the world and of the place of humans in it. For a long time it was regarded as the basic encyclopedia of life to which one referred for the truth about everything. To do so today means that, like the most rigid fundamentalist, one is left trying to show that modern scientific cosmology has got it wrong, that biological evolution is false, that the universe was made in six days about six thousand years ago, and so on.

The fact that the majority of Christians do not wish to ally themselves with fundamentalism but to interpret the Bible more liberally than that, does not mean that the problem is solved. Rather it is only then that the full impact of the problem comes into view. The fundamentalists really have a point when they say that if Christians once surrender the conviction that the Bible is the divinely revealed Word of God then they are stepping on to a slippery slope to which there seems to be no end.

We shall now look at that slippery slope. Incidentally it was also recognized by John Wesley 250 years ago. Because the Bible says, “You shall not suffer a witch to live”, he vigorously defended the practice of burning witches, saying, “The giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible"; and it would have been self-evident to him that the giving up of the Bible entailed the giving up of Christianity.

In one sense Wesley was strangely right. We need reject only one thing in the Bible as no longer acceptable to us, in order to reveal that we ourselves have become the arbiters of what we shall accept or not accept as true. And that is one of the marks of the radical shift in human consciousness. We have become autonomous. We are no longer willing to submit blindly to the authority of others, whether they be kings or politicians, Pope or Holy Writings. We claim the right to make our own judgments and let the evidence convince us on its own merits. In successive stages we have first questioned and then abandoned the concept of divine revelation, as channelled through holy books or holy persons. The process began in the very century in which Wesley lived.

This does not prevent us from finding much of great value in the Bible. But we have become the judges of what we regard to be of value. What we find in the Bible must be read critically. Its value to us should depend on its inherent power to win our conviction and not on the fact that it is in the Bible. We need have no hesitation now in saying about certain biblical statements, quite simply, that they are false. In this respect the Bible is no different from any other book. It is a collection of books, written by fallible humans like ourselves and these books reflect the customs and culture of the age and place in which they were written. The first roadblock which has to be removed is the false veil of sanctity and authority which has grown up round the Bible.

Attention was drawn to this particular roadblock in a spectacular way in 1860 with the publication of Essays and Reviews by seven Anglican theologians. Benjamin Jowett, classical scholar, theologian and Master of Balliol College, Oxford, said in his essay “The Interpretation of Scripture”, that “the Bible should be interpreted like any other book”, adding his own conviction that, when this is done, the reader will still find there is no other book quite like it. Essays and Reviews brought forth a storm of protest. It was condemned by bishops, archbishop and synods. Eleven thousand clergy signed a protest, declaring their conviction in the divine inspiration of the Scriptures. To this day not only fundamentalists but even most liberally minded Christians still assume that because something is said in the Bible it carries some additional authority. The fact that this is not so, must now be openly acknowledged.

But this is only the beginning. Prior to the emergence of modern consciousness our forbears had the feeling that there existed a set of fixed and unchangeable truths of which, if one knew them, one could be absolutely sure. We may call them the absolutes. Not only was the Bible the absolute Word of God and the Church the absolute creation of God, but social structures, class divisions and rule by monarchy, were all thought to be fixed for all time, resting on a divine foundation. All living species were fixed by divine decree. Above them all was God himself, the great Absolute.

But slowly we are coming to see that the fixed and absolute character of reality is an illusion. It arose early in human consciousness simply because, in the short life-span of human existence, so many things seem to remain constant. So it seemed natural to assume that on the six days of creation everything came into being in its permanent state.

The body of common general knowledge which is reshaping our thinking tells us, on the contrary, that everything in the universe is in the process of continuous change. There is nothing permanent and unchanging. There are few, if any, tangible absolutes. The story of this earth has been one of change, development, evolution. The only thing which seems to be constant is change itself. Even the speed of change is not constant, for it can accelerate, decelerate and go through quite sudden metamorphoses.

Now let us see where this takes us. The universe is an evolving process. The human species has evolved and is still evolving. The many human cultures have evolved and are still evolving. Some cultures have already died and others, particularly a global culture, are coming to birth. All is in process. There is nothing fixed or absolute in human culture.

This computer age has usefully supplied us with another analogy to help us understand this. The human nervous system centred on the brain may be likened to computer hardware. But computer hardware is useless without software. The language and culture which we absorb from infancy onwards constitute the software by means of which we construct our picture of reality and understand it. But just as there are many packages of software (and we are continually being offered much improved and more versatile ones) so there are many cultures. And through these cultures we humans have constructed reality differently. As there is no final and absolute package of computer software, so there are no absolutes in culture or language. Everything said or believed remains open to the possibility of change or revision.

At any one time, of course, there are many beliefs, stories, so-called truths, which we may find absolutely convincing. But we now have to allow for the fact that we are all children of our own time and place. We have been shaped by our culture. And though we may hold some aspects of it up to criticism (and this is something we are now increasingly doing), there is no way in which we can escape from the relativities of each human culture to some culturally neutral point. There is no such archimedean point within our reach. We humans are caught in a web of relativity in which there are no known absolutes.

When the modern scientific enterprise was in its first great flush of success and was undermining the traditional beliefs and absolutes of the religious past, it was commonly believed that science itself would provide a new set of absolutes. The mood is now changing in the scientific world. Not only do scientists always have to remain open to the possibility that new evidence may force them to revise their laws and findings, but it is now being acknowledged that all scientific endeavour is itself a human enterprise. Science itself is admittedly a new and very versatile package of computer software but it is still a humanly devised package and not a new set of absolutes.

The relative character of all cultures applies also to the dimension of culture we call religion, that dimension in which we ask and attempt to answer the deep existential questions of who we are and why we are here. Religion needs to be understood quite broadly, as in this definition by Carlo dela Casa, an Italian scholar, “Religion is a total mode of the interpreting and living of life”.

In the era in which humans saw themselves living within a world of absolutes, Christians very understandably claimed their Way, or path of faith, to be absolutely the only true way. So we still see on car-stickers, “Only one way - Christ”. That conviction stems, in part, from the words attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by me”. So the church through the ages asserted that there is no salvation for people outside of the church. The absolute claims made by the Christian tradition came under pressure during the missionary expansion of the 19th century when Christians proceeded in great confidence to convert the world to the absolute truths of the Gospel they believed they possessed. In doing so they encountered alternative paths of faith comparable to their own.

This encounter brought a turning point, exemplified by a book by the Lutheran theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) entitled The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions. Troeltsch set out to defend the absoluteness of Christianity but in the end was forced to concede that Christianity is just as relative to time and place as are its religious competitors. “History is no place for absolute religions or absolute personalities”i, he said. He concluded that Christianity has no permanent and absolute essence and that it is a purely historical phenomenon with all the limitations to which historical phenomena are exposed. By 1923 Troeltsch was declaring his conviction that “Christianity is at a critical moment of its further development and very far-reaching changes are necessary, transcending anything that has yet been achieved”ii. The second roadblock to be removed from the Christian Way is all claim to be the absolute and final truth.

But what does this do to the role that has been assigned in Christianity to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, whose title “Christ” is incorporated in the Christian Way? It means a number of things. It means that Jesus Christ can no longer be proclaimed as the one and only Saviour of humankind. It means that the mental image of a divine figure which Christians have constructed round the historical figure of Jesus has to be dismantled. It means that the complete humanity of the original Jesus has to be fully acknowledged. But just what that figure was really like and what he said have become a great enigma. The only records we have are in the New Testament, where already the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith have formed an amalgam from which it is impossible to recover the historical figure with either clarity or certainty.

One of the most provocative calls to abandon the absoluteness of Christ came from theologian Tom Driver of Union Seminary New York, in his book Christ in a Changing World, 1981. There he said that the words which the Gospel puts into the mouth of Jesus “‘No one comes to the Father except by me’ should be repudiated, along with the rest of that gospel's elitist, christocentric anti-Semitism"iii. He points out that we have no reason to believe that Jesus ever preached his own centrality and eternity; he further implied that if Jesus had made such claims they would have to be declared false.

In a world where the existence of absolutes seemed self-evident it made some sense for Christians to make absolute claims for Jesus as the Christ. But in a world of relativity where there are no known absolutes, it no longer makes sense. “The ethical theological task of the churches today”, said Driver, “is to find a christology that can be liberating in a world of relativity. Christ must be reconceived in relativistic terms”iv. Thus the assertion of the divinity of Jesus and of his centrality to human history becomes one more roadblock to be removed.

If some or even most of what has been affirmed about Jesus as the Christ is no longer acceptable at face value why did it arise in the first place? To answer this we must look at the nature of religious language. But first of all we must recall the human origin of all language. Language was not there at the beginning of time waiting for us to learn it. Language evolved along with the human species. We humans created language, very slowly at first, and we are still doing it. As language evolved it diversified into a host of languages, like packages of computer software. Every language, every word, every concept we use is a human creation.

Not only are there many different languages but we use language in different ways. It has been all too easy at the popular level in the past to treat all language, in any one culture, as if it were always operating on one level, as if language is language is language. This can be very misleading. There are many different ways in which we can use the same words. There is the obvious difference between prose and poetry. But, further, sometimes we use language at face value, as when we describe something we can see or hear; and sometimes we use language symbolically or metaphorically, as when we are attempting to discuss something which cannot be seen or express something we feel. Metaphorical language has both a face-value meaning (often drawn from something tangible) and a deeper meaning, which is the one really intended.

It has become very important to distinguish between descriptive or face-value language (as used by science and history) and expressive or metaphorical language (as used by religion). Religious language may appear on the surface to be describing objects in the external world, when in fact it is expressing emotions, values, goals, and aspirations which are being felt inwardly.

We have no difficulty at all in acknowledging this about the hymns we sing. They are clearly poetical and metaphorical. If we sing, “Round the Lord in glory seated/Cherubim and seraphim/Filled His temple, and repeated/ Each to each the alternate hymn” we do not really imagine we are describing a scene which could have been seen with the human eye somewhere in the universe. If the scene is to be seen anywhere it is in the mind's eye, that is, in our own imagination. What we have too often failed to acknowledge is that nearly all religious language and concepts are of the order of poetry and metaphor. They are expressing something of what we feel and see inwardly. Religious language expresses verbally something about ourselves and how we relate to reality. It is not describing reality external to ourselves.

When the first Christians ascribed to Jesus such titles as “Messiah” and “Son of God” they were using metaphorical language to express how they felt about him, what role they saw him playing for them. They were not offering a description of him which would have been open to public enquiry by an investigative journalist of the day. To illustrate this we may point to the distinction to be made between these two assertions in the Creed. “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried”, is a historical statement, a face-value statement which is open to historical investigation. “He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God” is a poetical, metaphorical statement not open to public investigation.

The reason why, for so many centuries, these two kinds of statement were thought to be of the same order is not just because they sat side by side in the Creed but because ancient and medieval consciousness had constructed reality in dualistic terms - a higher and a lower world, a spiritual and a material world, which were conceived to be equally real. If anything, the unseen world was the more real of the two by virtue of being eternal. It was further assumed that some kind of intercourse took place between the worlds as in prayer, miracles,and the hearing of the Word of God.

The reason why the unseen world seemed as real as the tangible world was that it was all part of the evolving culture of the West. It became part of the package of software which one embraced from birth. With the gift of hindsight from our current state of consciousness we can give an approximate explanation of why and how it all occurred. The internal mental pictures which our creative minds create to express our values, emotions and search for meaning were unconsciously projected on to the backdrop of the external world. Modern human consciousness acknowledges only one reality, a vast and very complex universe, but it is one. The failure to understand the traditional, dualistic view of reality for what it is, becomes another roadblock which has to be removed.

But if the unseen eternal world is only a language and possesses no ontological reality of its own (as the philosophers would say), what does this imply for human destiny? Traditionally Christians have seen themselves as having a foot in both parts of the dualistic reality, namely, a physical body which belongs to the lower world and a soul which is believed to have an eternal destiny in the higher world. In popular religious thought, if not always encouraged theologically, Christians often comforted themselves in bereavement with the thought that death was not the end of personal existence and they would meet up with their loved ones again “in the sweet bye-and-bye”.

It follows from the very nature of the one and only real world in which we live that human existence itself is temporal and finite. We too participate in the change and flux of this world where nothing is permanent, not even our selves. As soon as we come to realise that each of us has been shaped by the times and culture in which we live, we see it could not really be otherwise. The culture and age which shaped us constitute the only context in which we really feel at home. The destiny of each individual is limited to one's own age and culture. That does not mean that it cannot be lived in a way which brings a form of spiritual satisfaction which seems to transcend time.

The traditional view of human destiny, that this life is but a preparation for something even better beyond death in another world, is another roadblock which needs to be removed. Each of us lives one life and one life only. We are responsible for the way we live it and the meaning of life is to be found in the way we live it. That is the real and continuing meaning of the myth of the Last Judgment.

Only now do we come to what many will see as the most important issue of all - the reality we call God. This has been the linchpin of the religious world we inherited from the past. Because it is such a basic term the removal of this term does seem to threaten the complete collapse of the Christian world of meaning. People have been understandably reluctant to acknowledge that the concept we call God is a human concept. Yet the word or concept, “God”, is of human origin. It was created by the human mind in the distant past and has been continually refashioned to meet changing needs. There is nothing eternal or absolute about the concept itself. This word has become the human way of referring to the ultimate foundation of reality, that supposed absolute which originated it and which holds it altogether.

But in a world in which there are no known absolutes the word "God" has no objective referent. It is not the name of some readily identifiable, supernatural, absolute being. “God” is a word, a humanly created word, a concept conceived by human imagination. That fact was unwittingly acknowledged by Archbishop Anselm in his famous argument for proving the existence of God. It starts off, “Let God be the name of that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. That is, God is one who is conceived by the human mind. Even Martin Luther saw this; he said “That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, your God”. So all God-talk is a language, a very important language, by which we express and discuss that which is of supreme value to us.

Today we are in a better position than were our forbears to appreciate just how much the meaning and use of the word God has changed in the course of its long history. The word itself was created in pre-historic times and referred not to one reality but to a whole class of beings - the gods - who were believed to be the unseen forces behind all natural and mysterious phenomena. It is now nearly three thousand years since the first great radical change began to take place in the use of this word. The gods, as a class of beings, were banished from the human mind as having no substance and replaced by one of a different order, one who could not be visually represented but was to be experienced chiefly as a voice who spoke from within.

Even after this, the concept of God went through many changes. Karen Armstrong has published a study of these changes in a quite remarkable book A History of God.v It covers the way God has been conceived by Jew, Christian and Muslim through the centuries. If such a radical change as the replacement of the gods by God, could take place so long ago, it is hardly surprising that a similar change has become necessary and has been occurring in the last two hundred years in the transition to modern consciousness.

The traditional understanding of God which conceived God to be an objective spiritual being, Father, Creator, Benevolent Provider and Judge, has become another roadblock which has to be abandoned along with the heavenly spiritual world long thought to be his dwelling place. The whole concept of God, and the continuing use of God-language, is to day in crisis.

Some believe the concept has now outlived its usefulness altogether and should be abandoned. Others think it is such an important concept that once again we have to learn to how to use it in radically new ways. If we do continue to use it, it is essential to acknowledge it to be an expressive word and not a descriptive one. The traditional view of God in the Western world can be said to be descriptive or realist, in the sense it assumes that there is an objective entity to which the term refers, and that the reality of this entity can be confirmed by reason or by personal experience. In the past, of course, it was thought to be confirmable by divine revelation, a method which no longer proves viable.

On the other hand, the expressive or non-realist view of God acknowledges that in using the term one is referring to human values, to human aspirations and to the human search for meaning. It is a symbolic word by which one refers to any or all of these. Moreover in using the word all remnants of the traditional dualist view of reality need to be abandoned.

By way of example of this non-realist view of God we may quote such modern definitions of God as those of Don Cupitt and Gordon Kaufman. Don Cupitt has said, “God is the mythical embodiment of all that one is concerned with in the spiritual life”.vi Gordon Kaufman has frequently ponted out that the symbol of God functions as our ultimate point of reference, that in terms of which everything else is to be understood.vii

We have surveyed those aspects of traditional Christian belief which most conflict with that view of reality which is becoming increasingly common - the divine authority of the Bible, the assertion of unchangeable absolutes, the divinity of Jesus, the absolute uniqueness of Christianity, the dualistic view of reality, personal existence after death, and the external objectivity of God. These are some of the roadblocks barring the advance of the Christian Way into the world of the future.

In removing these roadblocks as no longer tenable, it will appear to many that, far from opening up a way to the future the loss of them only takes us down the slippery slope into a bottomless hole, which is sometimes known as nihilism. It is that fear which began to appear like a spectre over Europe in the late 19th century, the fear which the prophet Nietzsche so dramatically portrayed in his Parable of the Madman who announced that “God is dead”. It is this fear which has also prompted many to return to what appears to them to be the safety of traditionalism, even to the point of fundamentalism.

Is their any alternative by which the Christian Way can continue to be trodden in the absence of these strong supports? What shape and direction will it take? How could it be seen to be a continuation of the Christian Way of the past? These questions we shall explore in the final article.