We need to talk about God

This blog frequently refers in passing to Christian scripture and concepts that may disquiet the secular liberal humanist reader and appear to suggest a certain religious allegiance. The second effect may be an unavoidable consequence of the first, but if so, it is a sign of the times and their philistinism. The dominance of Christianity in the West over two thousand years means the Bible shaped thought and sensibility ten times more deeply than the secular canon of Greece and Rome. The meagre threadbare phrases of the gospel are hooks for whole bodies of reflection that followed afterwards, just as they look back to the verbal and spiritual riches of the Hebrew scriptures. That was the natural framework and background for grappling with any question whatever, about society, politics, character, and the human condition with its feet of clay. The English language bears witness to it in every sentence, but because we no longer bring up our children with the words of scripture, those thoughts may become fuzzy and terminally indistinct. My occasional foregrounding of these references to our common heritage is a gentle plea for cultural literacy. It will be plain enough to those who have studied theology what personal religious commitments, if any, this entails; but that’s beside the point of these posts. All the same, I can well do without readers who would turn up their nose at a writer just because of his faith.

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