Faith in the Future (Or Prophets of a Future Not Our Own )

Westminster Diocese

Primary Headteachers’ Conference

“Faith in the Future”

(or “Prophets of a Future not our own”)

John Abbott

President, The 21st Century Learning Initiative

(Writing in a personal capacity)

15 March 2002

Poole, Dorset

Faith; Inner attitude, conviction or trust relating man to a supreme God, or ultimate salvation. In religious traditions stressing divine grace, it is the inner certainty or attitude of love granted by God himself.

(Encyclopaedia Britannica).

“The opposite of Faith is not Doubt; the real opposite of Faith is Certainty”

(Dean Alan Jones, San Francisco Cathedral)

“O Lord I believe, Help thou my unbelief”.

“We have not inherited this world from our parents, we have been loaned it by our children”

(American native proverb).

“What is Man that thou art mindful of him?”

(Psalms).

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”

(Hamlet)

Faith in the Future. The title sounds ambiguous. It’s meant to. Does this mean faith as we might understand it in the future? Or does it mean that we have faith in the future?

I want to acknowledge both alternatives, and then to argue that unless we have faith in what, at this stage, I will simply define as “sacred” then I don’t see much reason for having faith – meaning an optimistic attitude – in the future.

I should tell you something about myself and why it is – with great trepidation – that I am attempting to make this presentation. I have never before spoken in any sense formally about theology, nor, apart from five-minute homilies in school assemblies, have I ever delivered a sermon! Many of you heard me last year speak to the topic “What Kind of Education for What Kind of World? Do we want our children to grow up as battery hens or free range chickens?” So you will know something about where I am coming from.

We each experience moments of “truth” that force us to think deeply. I well remember the day in Estonia some four years ago when I had just finished speaking to a group of teachers. An English speaking Russian cornered me with the profound question “Who are you?”

For a moment I was not sure if this was a question of identity, or philosophy. It was the latter.

“You in the West persistently misunderstood we dissidents. When we tore down the Berlin wall we did so because we wanted to be free to make decisions for ourselves. But you thought we did this because we wished to replace Communism with Capitalism. Now it looks as if we are replacing one tyranny with another. When the Berlin wall was there you in the West defined yourselves negatively; you were against Communism. Now that Communism is no longer a threat to you, your reason for being seems empty. Surely you are about more than just money?”

It was a question similar to one asked me by an intense, gifted seventeen year old in the Sixth Form of the school where I was Head some fifteen years before. He was experiencing both a personal and an intellectual crisis. He had recently read Richard Dawkin’s book “The Selfish Gene”. He looked at me, “If I’m no more than a collection of selfish genes, why should I bother with life? What’s wrong with suicide?” It was a chilling argument that he advanced, and one that earlier had led to the suicide of the brilliant mathematician George Price, seeking to understand what is becoming to be known as “Game Theory” as an explanation for human altruism.

Of course we are more than selfish genes, I wanted to assure him. Yet my own intellectual base was stronger on Faith than it was on knowledge of Maths and science. The argument, or rather discussion, that I had with that young man showed me that, if I were to make the case that life was sacred, I would have to understand the sciences far better. Faith has to do more than cover up for intellectual laziness. That scared me. I feared that I might move into such unfamiliar territory that I, like Charles Darwin and so many other good people before us, I too might lose my faith.

I was privileged to have a wonderful upbringing. My father was an Anglican priest. He was a very special man – as happy in his workshop as he was in his pulpit. God was in everything he saw around him. His theology was the Natural Theology of William Paley – God had created the perfect set of rules, and it was our job to understand and respect them. In my naivety I saw God as a white English gentleman, and the rest of the world in desperate need of “being saved”. I would, as an early teenager, have delighted in becoming a missionary, and in labouring to build my own church on some distant Pacific island. I fear, however, I might have been highly dogmatic in my statements!

There was one incident when I was thirteen that left me confused. It was the day I was taken by my parents to visit the Public School I was shortly to attend. “I hope,” said my father, “that my son won’t be taught evolution in biology?”

I can’t remember the Head’s response exactly, but it was, I certainly remember, curiously vague and ambiguous. There was something going on I did not quite understand, but I was too much in awe of those Gothic arches, chapel services, muscular Christianity, and largely other worldly teachers, to trouble myself about such radical questions.

My father died very young, and before I had developed enough confidence in myself to question him about the clash between science and religion. To him, however, I owe a quite enormous debt for he left me with an unshakable belief that we are, each and every one of us, God’s children.

Just how to describe that I have not found difficult since a curious incident when I was twenty, teaching for a year in a small boarding preparatory school before going to university. It was last period on a Friday. I was tired and had run dry of what to teach. “Let’s discuss space travel” one boy suggested, and so we did. The discussion was lively and fascinating. “Please sir”, said one boy “What do you think people on another planet would look like?” It was my time to be confused. I looked at the class and they too were perplexed, save for one boy who couldn’t keep still. “Please sir, it’s obvious. In the bible it says God made man in his own image, so if we look like God so must they!”

From that profound moment onwards I was ready for the radical theology of David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham. And I could never look another person in the face without seeing the image of the Divine.

As such I have to care as much for the poorest, as for myself. My father sought for an explanation for everything. He was extraordinarily inquisitive, and always full of wonder. And he had a true vocation. We were relatively poor, but God would always, he believed, provide. And He did.

I commend, incidentally, the marriage of priests if only on the selfish grounds that they can create the most magnificent homes for their children!

I survived the death of my father without loss of faith. In fact it strengthened me, for in a relatively unheavy way, I felt I had to carry on his work. But I never thought seriously about becoming a priest. Maybe the call of the wild was too strong; maybe I was already becoming too questioning of religious dogma. I was interested in the world around me, and I had inherited my father’s love of people. So I became a schoolteacher. Many of you will have experienced similar thoughts.

My career path had one significant, unique, difference. I knew a lot about teaching and about young people, years before I became a teacher. As a young university student I had set up an organisation to send expeditions of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen year old youngsters, staffed by university students, to spend the greater part of each summer holiday living on uninhabited islands in the Hebrides. In the close proximity of lively youngsters, themselves much excited by the beauty of the world around them, I came to sense in their questioning an echo of my own unanswered questions. It gave me, I think, a particular empathy for the search which teenagers always wish to make for themselves – “Don’t you tell me what you think, I want to find this out for myself”.

And so, in the mid-1960s, I became a teacher of Geography and Religious Studies at Manchester Grammar School, and in 1972 moved to Alleyne’s School, Stevenage, as Deputy Head, two years later becoming Head (one of the youngest in the country at the time). My theology was still that of William Paley and my father, and my philosophic position was that of Descartes. I was a Dualist. Religion and science were both important to me but they were separate. I was embarrassed, however, when trying to argue such a position with colleagues who told a different story, and I knew with increasing certitude that intellectually the two sets of ideas really had to come together. However, for some thirty years I ignored this challenge.

Let me take you straight through to a discussion I was party to in San Francisco in 1998. It was the first meeting I attended of Gorbachev’s State of the World Forum, the annual meeting of some nine hundred of the world’s most outstanding thinkers and scientists. It was there that I heard an eminent Austrian biologist say, with the greatest of sincerity “The future sanity of the world depends on the coming together of two great disciplines that haven’t spoken together for more than a hundred years – Biology and Theology”. In a split second I was back to that conversation between my father and my future headteacher. Fifty years on I found all my senses alert to a challenge I had long tried to ignore.

So, if I felt I had been in denial, that denial appeared to be far longer than my own lifetime. The “How” of life, as it were, was being studied in a very different way to the “Why” of life. If spiritual truths were as important as I believed them to be, why had we allowed them to be so marginalized?

My attempt to convince that troubled, suicidal seventeen year old based on philosophy and religious concepts, could not bring solace to a young mind shaped by the theoretical advances of modern science. My denial, and the denial of others like me, was increasingly out of step with the assumed “mores” of modern society as well. If, in 1965, I could assume that the justification for my position was that of being “in loco parentis”, by 1995 there was such confusion about the role of parents, that the underlying principle for how teachers thought they should operate, was in tatters.

If we need any “proof” of this confusion, look no further than last Saturday’s Guardian. Emmanuel College, Gateshead, is a highly successful City Technology College (a Tory initiative) designated as a Beacon School (by Labour) and which received an outstanding Ofsted report; parents love it and it is oversubscribed three times. It’s Headteacher, and many of its staff, are of a “fundamentalist” Christian tradition. The Headteacher wrote in 1997 “To teach children that they are nothing more than developed mutations who involve from something akin to a monkey, and that death is the end of everything, is hardly going to engender within them a sense of purpose, self-worth and self-respect”.

“That’s right”, I said to myself over breakfast, as I thought back to that suicidal seventeen year old all those years ago.

Recently the Head has gone on to say “Clearly schools are required to teach evolutionary theory. We agree that they should teach evolution as a theory and a faith position… schools should teach the creation theory literally as depicted in Genesis. Ultimately both creation and evolution are faith positions”.

This began to sound intellectually devious. “Two ways of coming to the same conclusion” my Dualist background argued, but surely we can be more reasonable than that. Are we to assume that the advances made in our understanding of science in the last two hundred years are not also “inspirational” and sacred?

The Vice-Principal evidently said recently, “As Christian teachers it is essential we are able to counter the anti-Creationalist position. It must be our duty as Christian teachers to counter these false doctrines as well founded insights”.

Now this really worried me. My coffee was starting to get cold! My own faith did not depend on being able to prove the detail of an explanation of Creation first described in language appropriate to five thousand years ago. To deny that our developing knowledge, gained since then, undermined a position of faith frightened me. It seemed not only intellectually naïve but spiritually vacuous; God made us with brains to understand new ideas, however challenging this might be. Surely “revealed wisdom” did not stop two thousand years ago.

The Guardian has seen in this a possible story of public interest. I’m sure it’s right to do so. The public is interested in such matters. And so too should we be. The Guardian approached Richard Dawkin (the author of “The Selfish Gene”) who said, “These men disgrace the honourable profession of teacher. By comparison, real teachers, teachers who respect truth and evidence whether in science or history, have so much more to offer. Today’s children are blessed with the opportunity to open their minds to the shattering wonder of their own existence, the nature of life and its remarkable provenance in a yet more remarkable universe. Teachers who help toopen young minds perform a duty that is as near sacred as I will admit. Ignorant, close-minded, false teachers who stand in their way come as close as I can reckon to committing true sacrilege”.

The Guardian sensed it was having a field day. In it’s third leader it stated, “Understandably Professor Richard Dawkin is incensed at the idea of Creationism being taught to children at the tax payer’s expense. However, many parents in Gateshead are unperturbed, and understandably more interested in good results than in details of the biology syllabus”.

Read that again. “More interested in good results than in the details of the biology syllabus”.

That is a mind-numbing assumption for anyone to make. Presumably a fair proportion of the potential parents who make the school three times over subscribed are doing so because the school has a sense of purpose, of values, of direction and is staffed by teachers who care and can see in each child a spark of the divine. They care because they have a faith, and that faith can’t be measured simply in terms of “the details of the biology syllabus”.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education and Skills simply compounded the misunderstanding. “What schools need to do is to teach the national curriculum in an impartial way. Personal doctrines should not override anything that should be taught in the curriculum”.

That, surely, has to be the most worrying statement in the whole of this sorry story. By whose standard is the national curriculum “impartial”?

A touch of humility is needed. Pope John Paul II said “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes”.

Three hundred and seventy-five years before that Galileo had expressed this most beautifully, “The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach how one goes to Heaven, not how Heaven goes”.

So, where do I dare to stand?

I guess I’m back with Adam. I’ve bitten into the apple of the tree of knowledge. As such I have to make decisions every day, almost every minute of every day, between what I think – with the knowledge that I’ve inherited from my forbearers, and that extra knowledge that comes to us as the years roll by and the human race discovers more and more – between what I honestly believe is right and wrong. This is no easy task, balancing the wisdom of the ages, with the new and often untested insights. But that is the challenge of being human.

Let me put that into context. Last week I was in Dublin. I, a Protestant, was in lengthy discussion with individuals in the Catholic hierarchy about the nature of spirituality in the 21st Century. As a student in that city forty years ago, you Catholics were being told by the then Archbishop of Dublin that it was “a mortal sin” for you to attend Trinity College where I was then a student – presumably I was the implied threat!

Last Thursday week I was in an ex-convent in County Galway, now a nursing home, holding the hand of a dying farmer (who used to live very near us) and saying prayers together… yet only some twenty years ago the priest of his parish was forbidding his parishioners to attend the funeral of any Protestant.

“We have to rediscover the Jesus story as it was before Christianity, and humbly appraise what are the essentials of our faith, and abandon the historical baggage”.

“We have, with all the grace we can pray for, to learn to start over again”, I was told in Dublin, that troubled city, where priests feel it not safe to wear their clerical garb as they walk down the streets, for fear of the backlash associated with paedophilia.

Balancing the wisdom of the ages with new insights is undoubtedly a very major challenge. But it’s essential. It could lead us to “the best of times”. That is why I am pleased to be with you.