Edward Norman

Two hundred years ago Jeremy Bentham wrote a tract which purported to demonstrate that the Christian religion was in effect manufactured by St Paul and not by Jesus. This was actually quite a common ploy at the time: a means by which freethinkers could assail Christian tenets without being prosecuted. And because St Paul’s writings occupy such prominence in the New Testament, and are plainly a major authority for so much Christian theology and understanding, there was reason well in excess of mere subterfuge to justify the procedure. In his restrained and in many ways compelling Introduction to his translations of the New Testament Rabbi Brichto (who died last year) adds a distinctive voice to what is therefore a fairly established debate about the place of Pauline theology.

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, by Rowan Williams While the Anglican communion has been disintegrating, its symbolical head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been writing an analysis of Dostoevsky’s novels. This in itself presents a need for explanation: Dostoevsky has generally been assessed as an habitué of the territory between agnosticism and atheism, but Rowan Williams sees him as the author of ‘a Christocentric apologetic’. Yet the characters in Dostoevsky are miserable and dysfunctional obsessives in the main; neurotic and repulsive creations of a mind that many have judged intellectually and morally opaque. In the 19th century and throughout the Soviet era Dostoevsky’s critics considered his books unhealthy.

The materialist humanists are winning — or have, perhaps, already won — the battle for possession of the moral conscience of the modern western world. The issues involved should have been brought into focus by public debate over the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, but in reality all the debate has done is to demonstrate how little understanding there is, how insensitive the modern world has become to attitudes to human life that posit the existence of external standards of judgment or of non-material values. The materialist humanists are winning — or have, perhaps, already won — the battle for possession of the moral conscience of the modern western world.

Christopher Hitchins writes with exuberance and a sense of the great emancipation which he supposes modern knowledge offers humanity. ‘Scepticism and discovery have freed them from the burden of having to defend their god as a footling, clumsy, straws-in-the-hair mad scientist,’ he says of religious believers, whom he invites to abandon their faith and to embrace ‘reason’ — though should they choose not to do so, he insists, they are at liberty to believe whatever they like, ‘as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion’. This book is a lengthy denial of religious belief, and an advocacy of atheism rendered in the familiar tones of evangelical assurance.

It was conventionally believed, especially by liberal Catholics, that Pope John Paul II’s theological and ecclesiological conservatism derived from his Polish background. In fact his mind was deeply Western; it was formed by his early study of Max Scheler and phenomenological theory. Benedict XVI, similarly, is usually perceived as an entrenched traditionalist and regarded — again, especially by liberal Catholics — as somehow naturally antipathetic to modern readings of Christianity. How far this is a reality may be adduced from this study of Christ. It is not, and does not attempt to be, a biography.

In Britain public money is being allocated to identify and promote ‘moderate’ Islam, in the hope of discouraging the ‘extremists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ whose supposed misunderstanding of the Faith is, in fact, the version most practised in those societies where it is the majority religion. The result is not likely to be much more than the detachment of a favoured westernised coterie of leaders from the main body of believers. The effects on the State are much more serious: the British government, after two centuries of receding Christian confessionalism, is beginning to endorse a particular interpretation of religious teaching — in the form of ‘moderate’ Islam — and even to offer it endowment.