Don’t believe anybody who tells you that there are no such things as fashion in the theology industry. Topics come and go. So do great names. Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Barth succeeded one another in popular esteem. I remember – I think it was an Easter Monday ramble on Epson Downs – hearing two adults (might have been a Baptist and an Establishment man) chatting cheerfully about predestination. At about the same time I was introduced to ‘Paradise Lost’ at school and came across those teasing lines that describe the more studious fallen angels moving apart from the rest to discuss freedom, foreknowledge, ‘And found no end in wandring mazes lost.’
What took me back to those days of my youth was part of a stark and unyielding sentence in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians: ‘They will suffer the penalty of eternal destruction …’ Such things are hardly ever referred to nowadays but in their time they caused a flutter in the dovecots. F.D. Maurice, theologian, and later John Stott, Rector of All Souls, Langham Place, had some uncomfortable moments on account of them.
Such subjects have simply become unfashionable. Milton had his tongue in his cheek when he described these industrious pursuers of vain wisdom. But in his majestic poem the mighty contest between good and evil went on its way with ever-widening perspectives. Inevitably it carried with it unanswered and unanswerable questions.
I haven’t looked at Studdert Kennedy’s poetic output recently but I did refer to one of his poems. It evoked a response. I was directed to his dialect poem ‘Well?’ The poem invited a comparison between the ‘is’ and the ‘might have been’. On judgment day the writer knows he cannot look his Maker in the face when he hears his voice say: ‘Well?’ That is beyond fashion and beyond tampering with. It is the lot of a creature before a God of grace and redemption. What good is fashion then?
A RELIGIOUS DOG
Turbans, necklaces and button-hole badges are ways of expressing religious identity. Beards, too, have a part to play. Not all my readers will regard dogs as fashion accessories or badges of religious identity but I remember a dog (a Jack Russell perhaps) that accompanied its master, a vicar, to church, took up its position by the Communion rail and behaved in such an exemplary manner that you found yourself beginning to think in terms of a Christian dog.
But beware the ankh.
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