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The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- General
- The Herald Scotland
'We are f****d up creatures' How famous Scottish Bishop gave up on God
RICHARD Holloway is furious at the thought of heaven. The mere notion of an afterlife disgusts him, confounds him, terrorises him. When Holloway dies, he wants the blank quietude of nothingness. No gods, no angels, no life everlasting. It's a rather surprising position for the former head – or primus – of the Scottish Episcopal Church, one of the leading clerical positions in the land. But then everything about Holloway is contradictory. He embraces the messiness of human life. That's why he abandoned his faith and the church, after all. Today, he's preparing for death, armed not with the surety of religion and the comfort of faith, but alone as a man of 91 who knows there's not much time left. He faces the inevitable with remarkable equanimity. While many lifelong non-believers turn fearfully to God as death approaches, Holloway has gone in the opposite direction. Ever the contrarian, you suspect that if God does exist and Holloway reluctantly finds himself among the heavenly choir, he'll spend eternity disputing with the supreme being. At his home, near Edinburgh's aptly-named Holy Corner, Holloway is explaining that once his new book is published next month, he'll lay down his pen. It's called, fittingly, Last Words. 'I've written many books,' he says. 'I'm an old man. I can't have much longer. 'But I'm still intrigued by the universe, why we're here, where we came from. I spent my life wrestling with these questions – usually from a religious angle – but I've reached a stage in life where I'm no longer convinced by any of that.' The memoir charts Holloway's life from his impoverished childhood to becoming one of Britain's best-known clergymen. In the 1990s, he stirred controversy in conservative circles with his defence of minorities, and liberal views on drugs. Holloway once said he'd tried cannabis. He would eventually feel compelled to leave the church, as he wrestled with his faith. Holloway even faced a heresy trial. Today, he calls himself an 'agnostic'. His publisher calls him 'Scotland's original turbulent priest'. It's a fair comment when it comes to his life as one of Scotland's few public intellectuals, but in private he's a pussycat – bookish and prone to giggling, a loving husband, devoted dad and besotted grandad. In an age of superficiality, which values ignorance above knowledge, Holloway runs wonderfully against the grain. He launches into philosophical debate within moments of meeting you, and is ruthlessly honest about his own failings. He is, above all, kind. He may no longer believe that Jesus is the son of God, but there are few who try as hard as Holloway to live by the teachings of Christ. With the world in a constant state of hate, and cruelty seemingly everywhere, Holloway's refrain is simply: 'Love thy neighbour.' He's a man of God, who lost his faith, yet still adheres to the philosophy of Jesus. How perfectly – messily – human. (Image: Getty Images) Existence ONE of Holloway's great themes – he's written 20 books – is the question, famously posed by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz: 'Why is there something, rather than nothing?' It's his starting point when asked about his journey from faith to loss of faith. 'We humans, unlike animals who accept their existence, developed questioning intellects. With our life comes the question: where did it come from? So we invented answers.' That's where it all goes wrong, he believes. The answers that religions offer clash with each other, 'provoking disagreements and sometimes violence – because one of the characteristics of religion is that they keep falling out with the each other. 'Looking back, I just don't know the answer – except that while you're here be decent and reasonable, care for your neighbour, love one another, then say goodbye. That's where I'm at.' He pauses, and adds: 'But something else happened to me. One characteristic of most religions is that they tell us very confidently that when we die something of us goes on forever. The thought of that actually appalls me now. 'If I wake up on the other side after I die and I'm ushered into some form of eternal lie, I'm going to be very unhappy. The thought of going on and on – even if I meet all my dead relatives and dear friends – makes me seriously fed up. 'When it's over, I want it over. I don't want to go on forever. That would be eternal boredom. After a lifetime of religion, that's the position I've reached. I hope I've the grace to die well, but I'm going to be seriously pissed off if I wake up on the other side. Here I am, facing the end. I'll be sad to leave, but I want an ending. I believe in endings. I've had a long, interesting life, I've done some good, some bad but, please, don't make me start all over again.' Holloway remains horrified at humanity's capacity for cruelty. The 'invention of hell' is, he feels, the great symbol of our appetite for sadism. 'The unending torment,' he says, talking of the burning and boiling set aside for sinners. 'Where does that poison come from?' He sees belief in hell as a 'terrible disease'. Although much of Holloway's life runs contrary to the spirit of these times, his spiritual journey very much accords with recent social changes. 'One of the things that's happened in my life,' he says, 'is the fading of religion. It's melting away like snow on a hot day in Scotland. The same is true in Europe. 'It still prospers in America, but not happily. The invention of religion, while it brought some good into the world, brought an awful lot of evil as well.' The problem is that religion is 'intrinsically competitive'. Churches teach their followers that 'ours is the right religion, therefore yours must be wrong'. He sighs: 'Looking back, it's all a lot of nonsense.' Rather than seeking dogmatic certainty, Holloway believes we should ask ourselves: 'Why are we here? Where did it all come from? What can I do while I'm here?' Conflict INSTEAD, religions turn people against each other. 'Look at the Middle East. Much of what's happening is due to rival religions knocking hell out of each other. I'm grateful for much of what religion has brought us – art and music – but it brought lethal competitiveness into human existence and I mourn that in my old age. I've had enough of the conflict and the beating up. 'I just wish we could say to one another 'this is how I see it? How do you see it? Oh, that's interesting, well let's be kind to each other while we're here'. It should be as simple as that. You're not here forever. While you are, love your neighbour as yourself. What else do you need?' Holloway deploys the Latin phrase 'odium theologicum' – 'theological hatred' – to explain what he thinks ails religion. 'Religions which at heart express compassion, all end up hating each other as they think they're right. If we loved our neighbour, that would be enough – wouldn't it?' He insists that he didn't reject religion. 'It left me.' Why? 'Because humans are questioning creatures. If you ask where the universe came from, and the answer is 'God created it', then the next question must be 'where did God come from?'. 'In theology, they say 'God just is that which is'. But to that I still have to ask the question, 'if God is the uncreated, infallible, omnipotent one, then why did he come up with such a shitty universe? Why did it make such a messy job of the universe?' After all these years, Holloway is now what he calls 'a compassionate agnostic'. Just to add to the complexity of the man, though, he still sometimes attends church as he enjoys the sense of community. 'I just don't like over-confident sermons telling me what the universe is up to.' Christianity, he says, 'still holds many lessons for me'. He separates the teachings of Jesus from the 'doctrinal system that it evolved'. He compares religious doctrine to political ideology. Born in 1933 – 'when Hitler became Chancellor' – Holloway lived through the Second World War, and saw what competing ideologies could do. He wants to 'milk what's best' from religion – the love and charity – and leave the extremism behind. 'Religion brought a lot of evil and strife into the world,' he says. Holloway prefers 'living with questions, rather than answers'. Given he clearly lives by the teachings of Jesus, how does he view Christ? As a philosopher rather than supernatural figure? 'As a spiritual artist,' Holloway replies. Jesus was a man with 'imaginative insights into the nature of the universe'. Says Holloway: 'He was a storyteller, he taught in parables, he didn't teach doctrine. His most profound parable was the Good Samaritan.' The story isn't just about helping strangers in need. In Jesus's time, Samaritans weren't popular. So the parable warns against factionalism. It depicts the outsider as kind and decent. Imagine a movie today in which an immigrant who crosses the Channel in a small boat is portrayed as heroic. 'The essence of Jesus's parables is: beware what religion can do to your compassion for fellow humans,' says Holloway. 'It can lead you to persecute them, to believe it gives you the right to kill those who disagree with you.' Heretic WHEN Holloway was a vicar in Oxford, outside his church stood Martyrs' Memorial commemorating the execution of Protestant 'heretics'. 'Imagine the insecure hatred that would lead you to put people on piles of wood and burn them to death. The insecurity which prompts that kind of hatred is what I dislike about religion. It prompts you to hate your neighbour unless they bow to the gods you've invented.' Jesus, however, taught only 'radical compassion'. Christ wanted others to be 'lovers not haters of mankind. That's what Jesus brought into the world. His stories are about the confusion of the human intellect. The resolution always lies in accepting your neighbour even though your neighbour disagrees with you. It's a simple yet radical message. But we're such flawed creatures we find loving simplicity hard to live with'. Atheism, for Holloway, is just another form of ideological control. 'The warning is in the last three letters 'I, S, M'. Isms always seem intrinsically totalitarian. I've explained the universe and that's it, and if you disagree with me then I'll either ex-communicate you, bump you off, or burn you in a fire. 'The more confident your religious position, the more likely it'll give you permission to persecute those who disagree with you. I'd rather have loving puzzlement than absolute belief. Beliefs kill each other.' There is, Holloway says, 'a fundamental insecurity about humans, because in us the universe has started thinking about itself. My wee cat doesn't think about 'catness', but in us something happened: we ask questions about the universe.' He adds: 'Humans are thrown into this universe, unsure where we came from, and we seek explanations, we invent isms. Isms fall out with each other. I've reached the stage where I suspect all isms.' The only 'ism' he'd like to see is 'one that laughs and loves. The things that destroyed humanity in my lifetime were all isms. I'm wary of isms, especially religious isms'. It was hatred of minorities which was the final straw for Holloway when it came to breaking with the church. In 1998, as primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, he attended what's known as the Lambeth Conference. It sees all Anglican bishops – the Episcopal Church is part of the Anglican Communion – gather every 10 years to debate church matters. The 1998 event, says Holloway, 'ended up a hate-fest against gay people'. That year, bishops voted that 'homosexual practice' was 'incompatible with scripture'. Holloway drove back to Scotland and spent time wandering the Pentland hills in religious turmoil. 'I realised I couldn't cope with this kind of organised religion any more as it was telling me that gay men would burn in hell. Some of the people who taught me most about compassionate Christianity were gay – very often frightened because their religion told them they'd be punished eternally. The uncertainty and danger they lived with made them compassionate.' Roaming the Scottish hills helped him come up with what would be his most famous – or in some eyes notorious – book: Godless Morality, subtitled Keeping Religion Out Of Ethics. 'I argued that if you bring religion into morality it becomes hateful. Religion is a human construct.' Holloway says of those who hate others: 'I will oppose you even unto death.' (Image: Richard at his ordination as Bishop of Edinburgh) Sadness
The Herald Scotland
6 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Historic Edinburgh churches walking trail unveiled
The Trail takes in all three city cathedrals, including: St Giles' Cathedral on the Royal Mile, where Queen Elizabeth II laid at rest; St Mary's Catholic Cathedral on York Place, visited by Pope John Paul II in 1982; and St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral near Haymarket, the city's highest building. Smaller churches highlighted include: Canongate Kirk, the parish church to the royal Palace of Holyrood House; St Patrick's Roman Catholic Church, which is modelled on Trafalgar Square's St Martin-in-the-Fields; and Old St Paul's, which hosts Alison Watt's iconic painting Still. READ: Sale of Glasgow west end care home nets £1m for charity Scotch whisky chief pays price as global turmoil hits industry Why the case for a 'Scottish visa' just got stronger The Trail is an inter-church – or ecumenical – venture involving the Church of Scotland, the Diocese of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh. It was designed by Anne Martin, a congregant from the Episcopal Diocese. The Very Revd John Conway, Provost of St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh, said: 'This lovely initiative provides a route to walk between the landmark churches of our beautiful city. Our hope is that the Trail not only shows people how to make their way from one church to another, but also helps reveal the long shared history and deepening friendship between us all as church communities.' Monsignor Jeremy Milne, Administrator of St Mary's Catholic Cathedral, Edinburgh, said: 'The ecumenical Walking Trail takes you through the heart of the city and is a brilliant exploration of Edinburgh's rich Christian heritage and living communities. It is a well-chosen sample of Christian history, culture and worship which offers rich reward to those who set out along its path.' The new walking route celebrates 10 of Edinburgh's most historic churches (Image: Peter Backhouse) The Revd Dr Scott Rennie, Minister of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, said: 'Edinburgh has some of Scotland's most uplifting places of worship, and I hope the Trail encourages people from far and wide to discover some of them. It is wonderful for our three church communities to be working together.' The Revd Fiona Reynolds, Advisor for Christian Life at the Episcopal Diocese of [[Edinburgh]], said: 'The history of the city and its churches are intertwined, and so it is fitting that our three denominations are part of this venture. It has been great seeing this Walking Trail develop from a spark of an idea to publication and launch.' Anne Martin, who edited the Trail leaflet and is a congregant in the Episcopal Diocese of Edinburgh, said: 'Setting up the Walking Trail has given an ecumenical opportunity for three Edinburgh church communities to work together to welcome visitors, and I hope it will lead to many more.'
Telegraph
23-02-2025
- General
- Telegraph
The maverick historian revolutionising our view of sex and Christianity
After we've spent the morning talking, Diarmaid MacCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the Church at Oxford University, sends me on a 'church crawl' – a favourite pastime of his. First to St Barnabas, a High Anglican church near his home in Jericho, north Oxford, where he takes morning prayers most weekdays; then down a single-track lane through Port Meadow to St Margaret of Antioch, a 13th-century church, simple and beautiful, without electricity, open all hours. MacCulloch is the kind of thinker who makes you want to embark on a pilgrimage. His mighty books range from biographies of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer to A History of Christianity: The First 3,000 Years. 'Context is all,' he says about the latter: the story of a religion can start a thousand years before its arrival. His latest work, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, entreats a similar response: follow every possible road from the present back through history, to find the true heart of things. Over several mugs of tea in his living room, MacCulloch explains that this book is ostensibly the result of three years of research and a further one of writing, but really it's 50 years in the making: the whole of his adult life, as a historian, a gay man, and a Christian. Priesthood was the MacCulloch family business. His grandfather was ordained into the Scottish Episcopal Church in the 1890s, then his father was an army chaplain for many years before leading a rural parish church in Suffolk, where young Diarmaid grew up. As a teenager, he kept a lid on his sexuality, but once he'd arrived at Cambridge, he began exploring its meaning, both through historical enquiry and new experiences. After meeting his first boyfriend, he says, he thought: 'What's the problem? This is lovely.' Per our standard picture of Christianity, we might expect this to have prompted a crisis of religion; we might think that MacCulloch would have felt himself exiled, and wonder how he became a leading historian of the Church at all. But in Lower than the Angels, MacCulloch argues that there has never existed a single, totalising Christian theology of sex. Instead, from the religion's first years to its present, what we see is a set of shifting and competing stances on the matter. These theologies don't just come from the Bible; they're also emergent constructions by ordinary people. 'Human beings are extremely complex,' MacCulloch says. 'So if you're going to take a simple story of the past, you are underselling what it is to be human. We need resources, and they're all there in the past. Some [practices], like burning sodomites at a stake' – which emerged in the Western Church in the 12th century, in tandem with the doctrine that all sexual intercourse must be kept within marriage – 'we can look at and think: 'We don't want to go down that path again.'' One major problem for Christianity today, MacCulloch argues, is that 'self-styled traditionalists rarely know enough about the tradition that they proclaim.' For example, it's now mostly forgotten that church weddings have only been the norm in Christianity for half of its history; in Western Christianity, he says, up until about the 11th century, marriages were 'jolly occasions with no church involvement'. And contemporary conservative evangelicals, who tend towards the belief that all non-heterosexual relations are sinful, often squirm when presented with the fact that Jesus Christ didn't say a word about homosexuality – even though it was prevalent, and within limits accepted, in Roman society around him. 'Jesus is a bit of a wild card, frankly,' MacCulloch smiles. Christ's silence on homosexuality has particularly bothered Christian thinkers, and MacCulloch mentions some of the creative excuses that they've offered. Take, for instance, the Christmas Eve 'sodomite' massacre. An extra-Biblical belief dreamt up at the start of the 13th century, it posited that on the day before Christ's birth, all the 'sodomites' of the world instantly died, hence there were no gay people on Earth while Jesus lived. Why has sexuality been such a perennial lightning rod in Christianity's history, and why does that seem truer today – in our era of 'moral majorities' and evangelical preachers across the West, Africa and beyond – than ever before? 'The Church,' MacCulloch says, 'has become so male in its rhetoric, and that incorporates antique attitudes about male privilege. It's about male insecurity, as simple as that – men wanting to hang on to the power which traditional religion has handed to them.' This may explain why contemporary Christianity appeals to many, especially a young generation, who align themselves with alt-Right politics. In the penultimate chapter of Lower than the Angels, MacCulloch covers Christianity's recent history, from the 20th century to now. 'It's quite depressing, really,' he confesses. For instance, as well as tracking the treatment meted out to LGBT+ people – which neither is straightforwardly justified by Scripture, nor has been constant through Christian history – he tracks the sexual-abuse scandals that have darkened both the Catholic Church and the Church of England over recent years. Take the latter's handling of the case against John Smyth, for instance, who from the 1970s onwards used his role in a Christian charity to abuse, often sexually, more than 100 young men; the revelation that Church authorities knew about Smyth's deeds and took no action led to the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in November. And yet, despite all this, MacCulloch isn't pessimistic about the Church of England's future. He urges us not to pay heed to the doom-laden voices; he points to the modest recovery in church attendance rates since the pandemic. People can distinguish, he says, between 'criminal stupidity and cliquishness and in-groups and public-school archbishops, and what they encounter in a parish church, which is so different – on the whole, a very hardworking conscientious clergy doing a job for ordinary people.' 'So often in Christian history, light may come through sudden unexpected reversals,' MacCulloch writes near the close of Lower than the Angels. I ask him if his own relationship to his Christian faith has changed over the years. 'Oh, completely!' he replies. 'I was a conservative Christian. I think it was being scared of the modern world – I just wanted to stay in my Georgian rectory and keep the barriers up.' What changed him, he says, 'was being a historian, being a gay historian, and being battered about by the church authorities. It has made me a better historian. I see what it's like to be excluded.' Later, at St Barnabas, I'm drawn to a mural on the north wall of the nave: as well as saints and martyrs, it depicts two ambiguously gendered angels with frothy pink wings. Until the fourth century, MacCulloch had told me, angels wore beards, and were represented as more indisputably male. Every weekday, MacCulloch comes here, sits down and probes the often contradictory verses of the ancient book that is the centre of his, and billions' of others', faith. The form taken by the angels of St Barnabas is frozen in time; that of the humans who observe them is not. The relation between the two is one of constant flux. And that fact, MacCulloch suggests, isn't anathema to Christianity – rather, it has always been central to its power. Diarmaid MacCulloch will be speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival, in partnership with The Telegraph, on March 31. Tickets: Telegraph readers can save 20 per cent with the code 25TEL20.
