A couple of weeks ago, ITV1 as we now have to call it, screened a play about the Second Coming. Jesus, or Steven as he is called in the play, had returned to earth and chose Manchester City football ground as the venue for his manifestation. At one point he spends some time in a Leeds hospital and, instead of coming out of the desert to begin his ministry, the play had him working in a video shop and spending 40 days and nights on the moors. We are given a Jesus who doesn’t get the full picture himself at first, but he uses the image of a computer downloading the plan over a slow link. Heaven doesn’t appear to have heard of broadband.

The central part of the play is that the Son of God, Steven, demands that the world present him with the Third Testament. If he does not receive this in the next few days that is it - oblivion, judgement day. He is of course inundated with theses and testaments of all kinds. It turns out that his girl friend, Judith, has the answer. The Third Testament turns out to be none other than that recurring theme: the death of God. The solution to solve all puzzles is that he has to die, God has to die. Imagine, there’s no heaven, no hell beneath us, no religion too. Sounds familiar that!

So Judith makes Steven spaghetti bolognaise laced with rat poison and he dies, God dies. The world does not stop, but everyone says they felt it. At this point I thought, wow we’re going to get a belter here. Where is he going to go next? Perhaps we will find God has to live incarnate inside each of us, for us to become divine in his absence? No, he doesn’t go there. Perhaps the child Judith bears will turn out to be the next incarnation of God, but this time the daughter of God? No, we don’t get that twist either. Perhaps we will find the world wanders around in an aimless void? No, we see Judith pushing a supermarket trolley and life goes on as normal. Mind you I’ve had supermarket trolleys that have given me the feeling that I was in an aimless void! So what was this play about?

Have we killed God and decided that we can survive just as well without him? Are we any better for no heaven, no hell, no religion? I don’t think so. Proclamations of the death of God have been quite regular in philosophical circles over the last 200 years. Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher, declared that ‘God is dead and men have killed him; they must therefore themselves be gods...’ This tapped into an emerging view in the 19th century that human beings had grown up and needed to take responsibility for the world they lived in. Several decades later the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed for plotting to assassinate Hitler, declared that man has come of age and therefore needs to grow up in the way we see our relationship with the divine and the created order. Much of this is a reaction against views of God that diminish our humanity, our capacities and our intelligence. They are connected with the emerging views of science that required a much more sophisticated view of the created world.

A couple of weeks ago a group of year 2 children (aged 6 and 7) from Austhorpe Primary school came into the church. I sat them in the choir stalls at the back and asked them to look around and tell me what they saw. Someone noticed how big the church is, how high the roof is. I asked them how that made them feel. One said that it made her feel very big. Another that it made her feel very small. Both views had something important to say. I am used to people saying that these great buildings make them feel very small and humble, mouse like. But large? We are allowed to feel big and grand. One of the early Church fathers, Athanasius, declared that ‘God became human so that we might become divine’. God has ‘made us little lower than the angels’, to quote the psalmist (Psalm 8:6), and children grow up to become adults. To be a child of God does not mean that we are perpetually 6 years old, but we are allowed to have an adult relationship with our heavenly parent.

Declaring the death of God is a violent way of saying that we have to grow up, and I suppose the Freudians amongst us will say that all children plot the death of their parents in the subconscious mind where desires and the drive for independence meets the reality of interdependence! Theologically calling for God’s death is either a desire to embrace oblivion, nothingness, or it is atheistic and doesn’t believe that God exists in the first place, so God can’t really die: it becomes just an acceptance of what is, or what is not in this case.

Our readings this morning (Colossians 1:15-20; John 1:1-14) made it quite clear that this is not where a Christian starts! Christ is at the foundation of all that there is and therefore to pull him out is to pull the plug on everything. To Paul and John, to expect the Christ, whether he’s called Jesus or Steven, to embrace oblivion would cause us all to disappear down an eternal black hole. It can’t be done. Move over John Lennon, your song is not thought out, or needs to grow up!

It is not that God needs to die, which theologically is a call for oblivion, but that our faith needs to grow up as we do. Adults have to take responsibility and the God who is incarnate in Jesus also chooses to make a home in us. As our Eucharistic Prayer G puts it, we are built into living temples to God’s glory. The call is the share in the eternal glory of the Father in the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit. We are called to ‘come of age’ as Bonhoeffer termed it, to make sure that we develop an adult relationship with God, in our faith, one that builds us up rather than tries to squash us down.

I read this week that on the 2001 Census form more than 42 million people ticked the box declaring themselves to be Christian. You may recall there was a box for nothing, so that so many put anything is remarkable, let alone that so many explicitly allied themselves with the Christian faith. That is nearly 72% of the UK’s population! What they mean by that will cover a massive doctrinal spread. But there is an enormous gap between that and how many come to church on Sundays. God is clearly not dead as far as most people are concerned. Whenever I talk to people who don’t go to church about God they are stunned that I don’t believe what they expect, that churches have come of age in their views about God and the advances of science. Somewhere there is a bridge between this 72% and what we proclaim and celebrate in churches like this one.

On Thursday Rowan Williams will take his seat as 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. If he does nothing else, I look to him to give inspired and thoughtful spiritual leadership which will in turn I hope prompt many to take a fresh look at what the Christian faith has to offer when it is grown up. If he does that alone, we could find some of that 72% taking a fresh look at the Church of England and in turn, or perhaps even before it, we will need to be ready to allow that fresh look to fill us with new life and shape a new direction. God is not dead and we do not remain aged 6 for ever either. The ‘Third Testament’ is not that God needs to die, but that we are called to ‘come of age’ that we may enjoy a grown up relationship with our heavenly Father.

© Ian Black 2003

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