SOLDIERING ON

Only a daring vicar will invite his congregation to sing ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’ nowadays. Why so? It has none of the blood-curdling language of the Marseillaise. It does not espouse violence. If anything, it is restrained and decorous. It suggests a contest conducted under the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules. There is nothing dirty or degrading about this kind of soldiering. It is the military metaphor sanitised and trimmed to a bourgeois specification. As far as the hymn is concerned it has all the merit and all the selective shortcoming of ‘All things bright and beautiful’.

If we renounce the gung-ho readiness to turn the Christian faith into a crusade, we still have questions to answer. When we wish to applaud determination, perseverance and fortitude, we can hardly do better than resort to the military metaphor. After all that is the way we talk about our response to the coronavirus. That is the way we envisage a hospital patient endeavouring to preserve his life or a company ensuring its survival in a competitive economy.

When we talk of ceremonial, we talk of soldiers on parade. What soldiers do when they troop the colour or change guard has little to do with their day job. That is to kill or to convince an enemy that it is not worth continuing the contest. It happens that soldiering can provide ceremony because it lives by order and obedience. Most Christians accept that worship requires some kind of ceremonial, simple or sophisticated, as well as a script and explanatory or hortatory speech.

We need metaphors to give shape to our understanding and practice of our daily lives. Like Bunyan, we may envisage the life of faith as a journey. Like the hymn-writer J.S.B. Monsell we may see it as fighting the good fight or running the straight race. Like another hymn-writer, Frances Alexander, we may see it in terms of answering a call, ‘Christian, love me more than these. ’Addison recast the 23rd psalm in terms of a routine spent under the care of a shepherd. Mostly we find the sheep metaphor not much to our liking. Society requires us to be self-reliant, self-assertive. Charles Wesley stuck doggedly to the military metaphor when he wrote ‘Soldiers of Christ, arise, and put your armour on.’ We do not think that is his best hymn.

St Paul used the military metaphor in his letters and inspired hymn-writers to do the same. Nevertheless, we have to beware of giving metaphors loads they are incapable of carrying. When we press the journey metaphor too far, we lose touch with the stabilising effect of a creed. When we press the military metaphor too far, we fall into stridency and fantasy. Emphasise the sheep pattern overmuch and we forfeit initiative and independent thought. Metaphors must be kept in their place.

OXFORD PLANT

Leading the ministry team at St Andrew’s, Oxford is Dan Hayward. The team includes Elizabeth Pitkethly, Chaplain at St Peter’s College. The church has a full programme of events and has combined with St Michael’s, Summertown and St Peter’s, Wolvercote to set up Cutteslowe Connected Church, a plant in a housing estate that meets for worship on Sunday afternoons.

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