Introduction

The question intrigued me. It is as penetrating as it is ageless. Scholars have sought answers to it for centuries. Centuries on, their successors will be working on it still. It is also a pressing question for countless lay men and women who are not scholars.

So I set out, both as one who values the Judaeo-Christian tradition and as a journalist, to answer it in terms of the secular culture which has become dominant in the West during the past century. I found myself focusing on the erosion of belief structures that has been going on for the past 200 years and asking: If people suspect that an objective God-out-there may not exist after all, as seems to be happening more and more, what follows? An honest atheism? A drifting agnosticism? Or are there new ways in which we can think about God that may make sense to secular people in a secular society?

My probings over more than 30 years lead me to think there are. After becoming more and more uncomfortable about using the word God and all that flowed from it, I now find I can do so again without feeling awkward, compromised or embarrassed.

In embarking on this exploration, I wanted therefore first to see what happens when we hold together the secular culture which western societies live and breathe, and the Christian faith tradition which has been the prime inspiration and guide of those societies for as many centuries as the West was Christian. Valuing each of them, I wanted to rub them together till currents of energy began to flow between them, potentially to the enrichment of both.

Secondly, I wanted to bring into focus what I sense to be a widespread unease among liberal-minded people in the churches or just beyond them, about whether the Christian religion still has anything intellectually coherent and constructive to offer in the world which secularisation has so changed. If that can be articulated, it could become the starting point for a new faith exploration.

Beyond that, I wanted to see it anything could be said that might help make the religious dimension credible again to at least some of the many people who, for good reason, have come to doubt it. The approach taken in this book suggests there can be, as long as we are prepared to understand the core Christian tradition as an experience and a process rather than a set of beliefs, and to bring to the religious quest all the integrity of our experience of life and all the richness of our collective imagination and creative energy—which is what I assume is meant by the life of the spirit.

Finally, I wanted to see what the implications of all this might be for a contemporary understanding of Jesus, and how it might help to reconceive the Christ of faith in a way culturally appropriate to the western world at the beginning of a new millennium, just as the Jewish and Greek Christians did in the context of their cultures in the first four centuries of the Christian era.

I believe there is much to encourage men and women of faith who are prepared to launch out in this way. This is not a time to cling doggedly to the rocks of past experience as if there was no safety beyond them, but to launch out in faith and see where the rapids may lead.

I hope this exploration will help point new directions for men and women who are uneasy about aspects of Christian belief and church life, but who have not given up on the search for a faith that takes seriously both the core of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and the secular world in which they live.

Ian Harris
Wellington, 1999