The St Cuthbert’s Lecture 2008 - Bishop Richard Holloway

Bishop Richard Holloway has a powerful physical presence, matched by his intellectual strength and integrity. On the occasion of the “St Cuthbert’s Lecture” delivered in St Cuthbert’s on Wednesday 20^th February, he held his attentive audience enthralled.

His subject, with the title “Shaking the Kaleidoscope”, concerned the human condition and the three big questions that we have wrestled with since we started to think objectively:

Where do I come from?

Who am I?

Where am I going?

Richard Holloway proposed what he called a “continuum” (or in another metaphor a “dart-board” or “really, a snake chasing its tail”) to help us understand the dimensions and implications of these questions and to locate our own position on this scale. He did not disclose his own position, but judging from his comments, his journey has progressed and his views have mellowed since he spoke to the Colinton “Lit” in October 2004 (see The Sign November 2004). So much so that he is to be in conversation with Richard Dawkins (the professed atheist of “God Delusion” fame), at the Edinburgh Science Festival on April 1^st on “The Meaning of Life”. When Bob Pritchard asked Richard Holloway, on which of the two Richards he should put his money, Holloway’s answer was typical of the tone of his lecture: that it was to be a conversation, not a confrontation but an exploration. Richard Dawkins was as much seeking truth as Richard Holloway, and there was a glimmer that Dawkins was moving towards acknowledging the possibility of a deeper meaning to life and the universe.

Richard Holloway fascinated us by the force of his communication, clear, direct, committed. It was as if he was speaking to each of us personally. It was important to him that we each engage with the three fundamental questions. But he was generous in his tolerance of alternative views. “I have lost the passion to get people to think like me: my passion is to get them to think at all.” It is clear that his world is a world in change, co-existing with ambiguity, learning from experience – living in the now and not the past, and not being judgemental.

To come back to the talk: Holloway’s theme was: most humans at some point ask themselves “what is the meaning of life?” – questions that philosophers call ontological. There is no undisputed answer to this question – we are indeed a riddle to ourselves. We know there is something, but what is it? We can use deductive reasoning (e.g. Paley’s watch) to say the world is so complicated it cannot have invented itself, or we can fall back on revelation – the idea of God revealing mysteries to us humans, either written down as the immutable truth (fundamentalism and the resultant dogmatism) or as man’s imperfect understanding, subject to revision.

So how can we respond in this search for answers? To help us analyse this, Richard Holloway suggested a “continuum” (not necessarily a straight line) with four notches, which are:

1. “Strong Religion” 3. “After Religion”

2. “Weak Religion” 4. “Absence of Religion”

We are not to imagine these as stages as the one better than the other. Each has its justification and relationship to historical or cultural contexts. There are gradations along the scale and inconsistencies within each definition. Yet this model helps us to define our own position and thus the direction in which we might be moving.

The characteristics of each position were given as:

1: “Strong Religion”: adherents claim to have an infallible record of God’s self-revelation. They claim that they are the chosen with permanent and unalterable truth (knowledge based – epistemological). Whilst this gives rise to a strong sense of identity, it also results in conflict with other knowledge systems, e.g. Galileo’s recognition that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. A strong religious system implies being locked into the past – “God’s Law” – one cannot change one’s mind in the light of experience. Thus its adherents are in a state of permanent dispute with the imperative of change in human history. Politicians respond to this by granting “opt-outs” to religious organisations, an inherently undesirable state of affairs.

2: “Weak Religion”: this is only “weak” in the sense that it believes that humanity is incapable of receiving the right message – therefore religious systems are inherently imperfect. There is a systemic hesitancy about the whole enterprise. One might call this attitude critical realism. Whereas Weak Religion lacks the focus of Strong Religion, it has the positive side that it believes that revelation is still happening, can accept ambiguity and avoids collision. It is in touch with the ethical changes of the time, for example the position of women or homosexuals in society. Holloway suggested the slogan “A Woman for Pope”!

3: “After Religion”: this segment is peopled by those who are still on the fringe of religion, but either moving out from 1 or 2, of moving in from 4. Holloway implied that it was a sort of no-man’s land for seekers. The rational believed there was no divine revelation – everything was happening within our heads. Humankind is immensely creative but at the same time has destructive power to project evil onto others, resulting in war, killing and perversion of power. In search of knowledge, logos (facts) were liable to go out of date, but mythos (stories) encapsulated lasting truths (e.g. the Garden of Eden). From Holloway’s description of “After Religion”, there remained the suspicion that the three questions were still not satisfactorily answered, and those in this category were still struggling with faith or non-faith.

4: “Absence of Religion”: Holloway told us that there were some people who simply did not “get” religion (as the tone-deaf did not understand music, or the colour-blind, colour). These people do not ask the big questions. The weak form of this position is not upset by religious people (indeed it may be wistful for it), but the strong form hates religion and actively works against it, claiming that all evil in the world is done in the name of religion.

As a final comment Richard Holloway stated that we are drawn to our own position partly by experience, but also by many factors outside our control, for example, birth, culture and inherited predispositions.

What can we deduce about Holloway’s own stance? He was not explicit about this, but from his comments he rejected 1: “Strong Religion” and 4: “Absence of Religion” as not being constructive positions. Although there are some who claim to do it, avoiding the big questions (at least at some point in one’s life) is not an option – which does not mean that one can find the answers, but one should try. That leaves 2: “Weak Religion” or 3: “After Religion” as the intellectual and emotional battlefields on which we should explore these issues.

Richard Holloway is recognised as a leading liberal in Christian thought, for some going so far as to question the validity of established disciplines of religion. However for those of us who heard him, the message was clear. Keep thinking, keep questioning, keep searching and as one inevitably swings between faith and non-faith (the journey of so many, including Holloway himself) do not lose hope. Those were not his exact words, but that is the message I derived from the St Cuthbert’s Lecture.

Christopher Davies