Contemporary Christianity as a New Religion

7/30/2019 Contemporary Christianity as a New Religion

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CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITY AS A NEW RELIGION 17

death would silence him: he is, right now, the only impresario of the millen

nium who can mobilise millions at will. How did we get a rooster at thepinnacle of the most aggressively owlish religious institution in the westernworld? And how is this aged man able to turn the world into a stage for hisfeats of social magic? Who and what else are out there besides him? Allgood questions.

Richard Landes is Professorof Hutory and Directorof the Center for Millennial Studie

atBoston University.

Contemporary Christianity as a New Religion

Paul Badham

In recent years my research was largely directed towards writing a book

to celebrate the Centenary of the Modern Churchpeople's Union in 1998.1

Looking back at the theological controversies which gave birth to EnglishModernism and exploring the controversies in which they were involved inthe 1920s I have come to realise that the belief-system which the earlyModernists criticised no longer exists within the mainstream of contemporary Christian thought. Yet the views of the Modernists' opponents werewhat previous generations of Christians had always understood Christianityto be. So if Christians today believe in a very different way from their great-

great-grandparents they also believe differently from their forebears in thefaith across previous centuries. If I am correct about this then there wouldseem to be a case for treating Contemporary Christianity as a new religion,or at least treating historical Christianity and contemporary Christianity astwo quite different religions. For the differences between them are quite asgreat as the differences between either version and any of the other worldfaiths.

Victorian Beliefs

Let me start by describing the basic understanding of Christianity asbelieved in by an ordinary Christian 150 years ago. Almost all assumed


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18 CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITY AS A NEW RELIGION

the drama of salvation God wanted to save at least some out of this 'mass of

perdition' and accordingly sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross as asacrifice to atone for, and take away the guilt of Adam's original sin whichhad so tainted his descendants. Because Jesus was perfect in both divinityand humanity, God accepted the sacrifice of his life as paying the price forhuman sin. God's anger was averted from those who trusted in Christ fortheir salvation. According to this system of thought God wanted men andwomen to know how to identify Christ, so God sent prophets to foretell inadvance how and where he would be born and the atoning death that hewould die. When Jesus came he performed miracles to prove his identity

and boldly proclaimed his pre-existent divine status declaring that 'beforeAbraham was I am'. He was then crucified in accordance with the divineplan, rose from the dead and sent his Spirit on his Church. At the end oftime Christ would physically return to earth. The corpses would bereassembled in their graves, and raised from the dead. Those who hadaccepted Christ as their personal saviour would be carried by the angels toheaven, while the rest (the vast majority) would be thrown into hell andtortured day and night for ever.3 This tremendous climax would finally

vindicate God's justice and mercy and gready enhance the bliss of thesaved.

Such an outline of Christian belief is so far removed from what evenconservative Christians would affirm today that you may think that I havepainted a caricature of traditional Christian doctrine. But this is not thecase. Detailed exploration of what it was that Victorian liberals rebelledagainst shows that it was precisely against such beliefs that they launchedtheir critique. Moreover each one of these beliefs goes way back in Christ

ian history. Belief in the infallibility of scripture and the literal truth of asix-day creation was a largely unquestioned assumption from the earliestdays of the faith. Belief in the 'fall' of Adam and Eve was axiomatic toPauline theology and a developed understanding of their 'original sin' goesback at least to St Augustine. Similarly the idea that the Old Testamentprophets had foretold the coming of Christ is found explicitly in both StMatthew's Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, while the seeing of miracles as 'signs' of Christ's true nature and mission is a theme of St John'sGospel. A developed understanding of substitution atonement goes back at

least to St Anselm, replacing an understanding of Christ's death as aransom paid to the Devil which had been widely believed earlier. A full-


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200 CE4 and has been endorsed by many of the leading Christian saints and

theologians ever since. According to Peter Lombard's influential textbook'the elect shall go forth . . . to see the torments of the impious, and seeingthis they will not be affected by grief, but will be satiated with joy at the sightof their unutterable calamity.'5 St Thomas Aquinas wrote that 'in order thatthe happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that theymay render more copious thanks to God, a perfect view of the sufferings ofthe damned is granted to them'.6

Almost all contemporary Christians accept that taken as a totality this

belief-system, though assumed by the vast majority of Christians right up tothe Victorian era, is no longer credible. As J. S. Bezzant put it:

known facts of astronomy, geology, biological evolution, anthropology,the comparative study of religions, race and genetical and analyticpsychology, the literary and historical criticism of the Bible, with theteaching of Jesus and the moral conscience of mankind, have banishedthis scheme beyond the range of credibility.7

The reason that the traditional drama of salvation became untenable was

that astronomy and geology shattered the Genesis rimescale,8

while biological evolution and anthropology showed that the human race was notcreated perfect, but gradually developed from a sub-human past. Hence theconcept of an original sin damaging pristine virtue became untenable.9 Therise of historical and literary criticism in classical studies and the subsequentapplication of this methodology to biblical studies revealed that theprophets of Israel should be understood as men who proclaimed the will ofGod to their own day, rather than as soothsayers of a far distant messianicfuture.10 Likewise the study of comparative religion showed that the attribution of miraculous powers to charismatic religious leaders was a commonfeature of human religious experience, and hence the telling of such storiesabout Jesus could in no way be considered as evidence of any divine statusfor him.11 Most importandy of all a new understanding of morality revoltedagainst the idea of Jesus dying to 'placate' the anger of God and regardedthe idea of everlasting torture in hell as incompatible with the belief thatGod is love.

But with the abandonment of the traditional schema of salvation Christianity becomes a very different religion. Hitherto the message of salvationthrough Christ's cross had been for the vast majority of Christians what


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20 CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITYAS A NEW RELIGION

telling the coming of Christ no scholar imagines that this was the original

meaning of such passages. Likewise although the 'fall' continues to bereferred to, few scholars believe that it relates to an aboriginal historicalevent. And though Christians still talk of 'being saved' they do not specifythat it is from 'God's wrath and everlasting damnation' that people are to besaved! Instead the phraseology has floated free from the belief system of

which it was once part and now seems to refer to a 'feel-good' factor associated with a decision to followJesus. For it is apparent that with the rejectionof hell there is no damnation to be saved from and there is a widespreadacceptance even in Evangelical circles that eternal salvation is open to all.

Many people inside and outside the Churches are unaware of howgreat is the difference between contemporary and historical Christianity.One reason for this is that when it comes to doctrines which have always

been recognised as central to historic Christianity many thinkers whostrongly identify themselves with the continuity of the Christian faith arenot happy to say no longer believe in that particular core doctrine'.Instead they will reinterpret the belief as really meaning something quiteother than what there forebears in the faith meant by it. As a consequence

some scholars who think of themselves as conservative are actually quite asfar removed from traditional believing as are radical or modernist thinkers

who consciously reject older beliefs. Let me illustrate what I mean by looking at how some fairly conservative thinkers make use of the Bible and howtheydiscuss the divinity of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of the atonement, theunderstanding of salvation and the resurrection of the body.

Formost of Christian history Christians took for granted that the Biblehad been literally dictated by God and hence was totally infallible in all itsteaching. As late as 1861, Dean Burgon said of the Bible, 'Every book of it,every chapter of it, every verse of it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, isthe direct utterance of the most high . . . fauldess, unerring, supreme.'

12And

not merely fauldess on matters of religion but also on matters of science,history, and morality. Burgon once visited Petra on the Gulf of Aqaba andfamously celebrated it as rose red city - "half as old as time!"'

13For

Burgon that was no poetic fancy but literal truth for if biblical chronology istaken literally the date of creation would be 4004 BCE and a city 3000 years

old was literally 'half as old as time! ' It is hard for us today to imagine whata shortened perspective on antiquity this implied, but for Burgon and forh h lf f h l h i d h i f hi i f h i f lli


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CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITYAS A NEW RELIGION 21

Appealing to Scripture Today

Now however this has in practice almost completely changed in thatoutside extreme fundamentalist circles all theological colleges and seminaries teach and practise the methods of historical and literary criticism. And

though conservatives may appeal to the authority of scripture to support

some particular position such use is always extremely selective. To give arecent example, the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops made greatplay about appealing to the authority of scripture in their recommendation

that practising homosexuals should not be ordained, but no bishop would

have dreamed of supporting what the scriptures actually say which is thatpractising homosexuals should be put to death.

14Outside a lunatic fringe no

contemporary Christians believe in biblical infallibility to the extent ofthinking that biblical law could provide a realistic basis for modern societyeven though many continue to give lip service to biblical authority.

The same kind of internal reinterpretation happens when a contemporary Christian claims to believe thatJesus was God. Compared to the beliefsof historical Christianity this is always watered down. The classic under

standing of the divinity of Christ was that Jesus was a divine person withboth a divine and a human nature. Throughout his ministry he was alwaysconscious of himself as being God. He claimed divinity through the am

sayings' and he performed miracles as signs of his status. Hence St ThomasAquinas claimed that although Jesus in his human nature gained empiricalknowledge through the senses as we do, at the same time he also had accessthrough his divine nature to the unlimited knowledge of God: 'With perfect

insight he beheld all God's works, past, present and future . . . he sees inGod everything God does and in this sense can be called omniscient.'

15

Moreover he lived all his life in the full knowledge of his part in the divineplan of redemption:

He the Lord and maker of history chose his time (to be born), his birthplace and his mother . . . . His manner of life was shaped to the purposeof his incarnation, because as he himself proclaimed, Tor this I was

born and for this I came into the world, that I should bear testimony tothe truth.'

16

ADivine Jesus

Since the rise of biblical criticism this picture of Jesus's divinity has


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22 CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITYAS A NEWRELIGION

first-century Jewish person in ancient Palestine. This included a belief which

he shared with many of his contemporaries that the end of all things wouldcome within the lifetime of those who heard him speak.

17For liberal and

modernist writers, accepting such facts requires abandoning belief in the

incarnation in any literal sense even though they claim that in a metaphori

cal or symbolic sense one can still speak of Jesus revealing God through the

way he lived.

However, in the case of self-consciously conservative thinkers, a strong

attempt is ma de to claim that they still believe in Jesus's divinity in a literal

sense. There are two quite different ways in which this is done. Some, likeKarl Barth are quite 'indifferent'

18to what can be known about the histori

cal Jesus arguing that from the perspective of the Christian creeds all that

matters is belief in the incarnation itself. The historical Jesus can be

regarded as a 'divine incognito'.19

The problem with this view is that while

preserving the language of orthodoxy it removes its significance. For how

can God be truly made known through an 'unknown' human life?

The second kind of conservative response is to accept everything that

New Testament scholarship says about the human limitations of the historical Jesus, but to go on to say that in the process of becoming human the

eternal and pre-existent divine Christ emptied himself of all his divine

power, knowledge and self-awareness of divinity. The theory is called 'keno-

sis' after the Greek word for 'emptying' and is based on Philippians 2:7.

Brian Hebblethwaite is a good example of a kenotic thinker. He believes

that Jesus shared all the limitations of human psychology and knowledge,

and yet remained divine.

God himself, without ceasing to be God, has come among us, not just inbut as a man, at a part icular time and place. The human life lived and

the death died have been held quite literally to be the human life and

death of Go d himself in one of the modes of his eternal being.20

Adrian Thatcher believes that Jesus was both Truly a Person and Truly God, yet

he fully accepts that

There is scarcely a single competent New Testament scholar who is

prepared to defend the view that the four instances of the absolute use

of am' in Jo hn . . . can be historically attributed to Jesus.21


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CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITYAS A NEW RELIGION 23

and states that Jesus was mistaken about the programme which God

planned to follow. Baker argues that any true doctrine of the incarnationwould be destroyed if we imagine for a moment that Jesus was everconscious of being God: 'It is simply not possible to share the common lotof humanity and be aware of oneself as one who has existed from everlasting.'

23Yet Baker thinks of himself as a firm believer in the orthodox doctrine

of the incarnation.

It seems to me however in reality the kenoticists reject the traditionaldoctrine of the incarnation quite as much as those who treat it as a religious

metaphor. Is there any real difference between saying do not believe thatJesus was literally God incarnate' and saying instead believe Jesus wasGod incarnate but that during his earthly life he had emptied himself socompletely of divine attributes that he did not know he was God and wasseriously mistaken about God's intentions.' I suggest that all the kenoticistshave preserved is the old terminology. All real meaning has been 'emptiedout' of the doctrine along with the removal of all the divine attributes.

The Atonement Today

A similar thing has happened to the doctrine of the atonement incontemporary Christianity. Earlier generations of Christians believed thatthe death of Jesus was an objective act which literally changed everything.For St Gregory of Nyssa and St Augustine the human nature of the dyingJesus was like the bait placed on a fish-hook (St Gregory of Nyssa) or in amouse-trap (St Augustine) in order to deceive the devil into swallowingChrist's divinity which could then destroy the devil's power. On this theoryJesus's death was a ransom paid to the devil to ensure the release of Christ's

followers from sin and death. However since the time of St Anselm mostChristians understood the atonement differendy. According to St Thomas

Aquinas, Luther and Calvin the ransom was paid to God. The death ofJesus was 'a sacrifice by which God was placated'. On this view Jesus died topropitiate God's wrath and enable him to forgive those who accepted theirsalvation through trust in Christ as their personal saviour.

24There was a very

powerful message in the Victorian Good Friday hymn:

He died that we might be forgiven,

He died to make us good,That we might go at last to heaven,


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sterile, immoral, and out of character with what we know of God.25

Simi

larly the staff members of the conservative evangelical theological collegeswho joined in John Goldingay's collection of essays on the Atonement Today

were also unanimous in rejecting older views of the atonement either in

terms of a ransom paid to the devil as in the earliest theologies or as the Son

appeasing or propitiating the wrath of God the Father in later theologies.26

But without any realistic sense of a ransom being paid somewhere what

meaning is left in keeping the language of redemption? Carey has no

answer to this except to say that traditional terminology about the atone

ment 'can't be put to definitive analysis'.27

Stephen Sykes explores the same

predicament accepting that although 'phrases and sentences' associated

with the older atonement beliefs are 'the common coin of the Church's

worship' explanations of such terms are 'not obvious'. Consequendy if an

'inquirer without a religious background but with an instinct to be disputa

tious were to demand one, we might quickly be in some difficulty'.28

Sykes'

use of the phrase the 'common coin of the Church's worship' is interesting.

It reminds me of a comment I once heard Don Cupitt make that much

Christian language today is like a currency which is no longer in circulation

but which people interested in antiques still collect. The language of sacrifice and ransom would seem good examples of such currency.

How then is the Atonement understood by contemporary Christians.

One way is that of Karl Barth who insists that the Crucifixion involved 'the

humiliation and dishonouring of God Himself . . . . In this passion there is

legally re-established the covenant between God and man, broken by man

but kept by God.'29

God was in no way changed by Jesus's death but human

attitudes were changed. The difficulty with this however is that this change

is not something which historians or anthropologists can document, anymore than the supposedly antecedent 'fall' can be verified or falsified. And

this lack of any supportive evidence is fatal to any objective claim. As tends

to happen in Barth 's system the old language is preserved but it is emptied

of cognitive meaning.

A Suffering Go d

There is however one understanding of Jesus's death in contemporary

theology which does seem meaningful, and which has become increasingly

popular as a way of talking about it. This is that God was 'wholly present'

inJesus's suffering on the cross and that this illustrates the way in which God


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tory response to evil'32 and most contemporary Christians think this is what

Christianity is all about.This however beautifully illustrates my point that contemporary Chris

tianity should be treated as a quite new religion. Traditional Christianityalways taught that God was both omnipotent and impassible. And it explic-idy taught this in relation to the death of Jesus who from an orthodoxperspective suffered only in his humanity. This was so important to theFathers at the Council of Chalcedon which defined Christian orthodoxy in451 CE that before doing anything else they expelled from the priesthood

anyone who dared to say that God suffered in Christ.

Will We be Saved?

It might seem that there couldn't be a bigger difference in religiousbelief than between contemporary Christianity's faith in a powerless andsuffering deity and the faith of historic Christianity in a God who was bothOmnipotent and Impassible. But there is another difference which is actually even wider. This is the difference between the opinion of most contem

porary Christians that God is universally loving and whose will it is that allhuman beings will be saved and the historic Christian view which was thatall non-Christians would be tortured for ever. This view found classicexpression at the Council of Florence of 1438-45 which declared that:

No one remaining outside the Church, not just pagans, but also Jews orheretics or schismatics, can become partakers of eternal life; but theywill go to the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels unlessbefore the end of life they are joined to the Church.33

Such views were dominant in both Catholic and protestant Christianity foralmost all of Christian history. As late as 1864 over half the Anglican clergyinsisted that they believed that the punishment of the damned would last forever. In contemporary Christianity such views have almost disappearedfrom mainstream Christianity. What has replaced them are either a viewthat those who are not saved will simply cease to exist, or much morecommonly that everyone will ultimately be saved.

Karl Barth explicitly rejects Calvin's view that only the 'elect' will be

saved and instead talks of an 'all-inclusive election'.34 Pope John Paul IItakes exacdy the same view insisting in his encyclical Redemptor Hominis that


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'for God all things are possible'. Consequendy the Catechism says At the

end of time the Kingdom of God will come in its fullness . . . and God willbe all in all.'36

A similar situation occurs in Archbishop Carey's ^ters to the

Future. At one point he seems to affirm the reality of hell but he immediately

follows this with talk of the wideness of God's mercy which will embrace all

humanity and that in the end God will be all in all.37

That this is indeed his

view is further illustrated by his decision at Princess Diana's funeral to pray

for Dodi al-Fayed 'in certain hope of resurrection to eternal life'.38

This was

in spite of the fact that Dodi al-Fayed manifestly embraced neither Christ

ian belief nor Christian morality. However Carey's declaration of certainty

about Dodi's eternal salvation attracted no negative comment from evangelical sources even though it was heard by more people across the world than

any other broadcast in history. What we have here is another instance where

contemporary Christians are reluctant to let go completely of traditional

language but nevertheless make it very clear that their real beliefs are quite

different from historic Christianity.

The Resurrection of the Body?

My final example concerns the nature of the future life. HistoricalChristianity taught a literal understanding of bodily resurrection based on

an absolutely literal understanding of the resurrection of Jesus. According

to the fourth Anglican Article:

Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body with

flesh, bones, and all things pertaining to the perfection of Man's nature;

wherewith he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth.

What happened to Jesus's body then was seen as revealing what would

happen to all human beings and his followers at the end of time when the'particles composing each individual's flesh' will be collected together, the

sea will 'give up its dead', the cannibal restore the flesh he had borrowed,

and the 'identical structure which death had previously destroyed would be

raised to new life'.39

This understanding of Jesus's resurrection and its impli

cations for us was affirmed in the Apostles3

Creedwith its dual assertion of the

resurrection of Jesus and of the resurrection of the flesh (carnis).

In my study of the Modernists I discovered that there was an absolutely

blazing controversy in 1922 when several leading Modernists criticised suchviews and urged the Church of England to remove talk of 'resurrection of


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thinks of the resurrection of Jesus in terms of the resuscitation of Jesus's

corpse.40

Yet that was precisely the starting point for historic Christianity. Asfor belief in the resurrection of the flesh as a future destiny for human

beings this belief has so completely vanished from contemporary Christian

ity that many Christians today simply have no idea that this is what the

Aposdes' Creed actually says in the original Latin. Apart from some Jeho

vah's Witnesses tracts, I know of no contemporary defence of such a view.

The significance of these changes has been somewhat concealed by the

almost universal habit today of translating Resurrectionem Carnis as 'Resurrec

tion of the Body' and then reinterpreting this to mean that after deathpeople will be given new and quite different 'spiritual bodies' to serve as

vehicles for their self-expression and development in heaven. And the only

bond of union between present and future bodies is that they will be

'owned' successively by the same personality. This is the view adopted by

the Church of England Doctrine Commission in 1938 and by the Catholic

Bishops of Holland in their 1965 Catechism.41

A similar view was expressed

by the 1996 Anglican Commission on Doctrine which despite vigorously

defending the language of resurrection against the language of immortality

then went on to insist that the

essence of humanity is certainly not the matter of the body, for that is

continuously changing . . . . What provides continuity and unity through

that flux of change is not material but [in a vague but suggestive

phrase] the vasdy complex information-bearing pattern in which that

material is organised. That pattern can surely be considered the carrier

of memories and of personality.42

What happens at death according to this theory is that 'Death dissolves theembodiment of that pattern, but the person whose that pattern is, is

"remembered" by God, who in love holds that unique being in his care'.

However there must at some point be a 'fuller realisation of God's purpose

for us all'. This will come with 'the resurrection of the body' But 'it is not to

be supposed that the material of the resurrected body is the same as that of

the old.'43

From these examples it seems clear that contemporary Christianity has

a completely different view of a future life than historic Christianity becausein no way do Christians today expect to get their old bodies back at some


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in their use of language than the theologians who serve on church commis

sions for instead of keeping but re-interpreting the language of resurrectionmost ordinary believers discard it. Professor Davies interviewed 1603 indi

viduals at length about their views about what happens after death. The

results were:

1. Nothing happens, we come to the end of life 29%

2. Our soul passes on to another world 34%

3. Our bodies await a resurrection 8%

4. We come back as something or someone else 12%

5. Trust in God, all is in God's hands 22%

In addition the soul was the most often selected second option among

those who gave two responses. So '54 individuals linked the soul with "trust

in God", 26 linked it with "coming back as something else" and 21 with

resurrection.' Moreover 42 individuals combined three choices 'trusting

God, soul and resurrection'. So in every respect it was the dominant option.

It is also interesting to note that 18% of atheists and 15% of agnostics

believe in the soul while only 2% of either believe in the resurrection. It was

also noteworthy that of the Anglicans asked only 4% affirmed a belief inresurrection.

44That provides an interesting contrast to the language-use (but

not the actual beliefs) of the Anglican commissions cited earlier.

What I hope I have established by these examples is that even conserva

tive Christians today understand their faith quite differently from their

predecessors. They have a different understanding of the authority of scrip

ture, the divinity of Christ, the nature of the atonement, the scope of salva

tion and the kind of future life to be expected. These differences are so great

that in reality contemporary Christianity is a quite different religion fromthat which it was in previous centuries.

Notes:

1. Paul Badham, The Contemporary Challenge ofModernist Theofogy(Cardiff: UWP, 1998)2. Cf. Article 9 of the Thirty-nine Articles ofthe Church of England.3. Cf. Revelation 14:10-11.4. Tertullian, De spectaculis ch. 30, cited in W. R. Alger, The Destiny ofthe Soul 1860 (Ne

York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 513.5. Peter Lombard, Sentences 4/50/7, cited along with many other horrific statements of this

type in the work of the Modernist scholar, Percy Dearmer, TheLgendof Hell (London:Cassell, 1929), p. 34.

6 St Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae Pt Ill Supp 94 art 1 in Percy Dearmer The


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CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITYAS A NEWRELIGION 29

10. J. E. Carpenter, The Bible in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1903), p. 171.11. Rowland Williams, Christianity andHinduism (Cambridge: CUP, 1856), ch. 11.12. J. W. Burgon, Inspiration and Revelation, p. 89, cited inj. E. Carpenter, The Bible in

Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1903), p. 7.13. J. W. Burgon, Petra, line 132 cited in The OxfordDictionary of (Rotations (Oxford: OU

1949), p. 100.14. Leviticus 20:13.15. St Thomas Aquinas, Compendium Jheologiae II, 6.16. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, 35, 8, andIII, 40,1, citing John, 18:37.17. Mark9:18, 9:1.18. H. Zahrnt, The Question ofGod, p. 21.19. James Livingston, Modem Christian Thought, (London: Prentice-Hall), pp. 329-30.

20. Brian Hebblethwaite, The Incarnation (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), pp. 1-2.21. Adrian Thatcher, Truly a Person, Truly God(London: SPCK, 1990), 77.22. James Dunn, Christology in the Making(London: SCM Press, 1980), p. 60.23. John Austin Baker, The Fooluhness ofGod(London: DLT, 1970), pp. 137-42,312, 144.24. Hastings Rashdall, The Idea ofAtonement in Christian Theology (London: Macmillan, 192

pp. 305,333,375,411.

25. George Carey, Canterburytters(London: Kingsway, 1998), p. 165.26. John Goldingay (ed.), Atonement Today (London: SPCK, 1995).

27. George Carey, CanterburyLtters,p. 165.

28. Stephen Sykes, The Story of Atonement(London: DLT, 1997), p. 5.

29. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics iv, 1 p. 247, Gollwitzer, p. 119.30. Carey, Canterburyfetters^.167.

31. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Utters andPapers from Prison (London: SCM Press, 1963), p. 122.

32. Cited in Carey, Canterbury Utters, p. 167.33. Denzinger, The Church Teaches: Documents ofthe Church in English Translation (

Herder, 1965), p. 165.34. James Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, p. 399.

35. Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis (Rome, Encyclical Letter, 1979), para 14.

36. Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Chapman, 1994) pp. 240-1.

37. Carey, Canterbury Utters, pp. 220-33.

38. The Sunday Times September 7, 1997 and also the BBC CD of the Funeral.39. Collated from Rufinus, Apostks3

Creed, para 42; Revelation 20:13; Augustine, City of God22.20; Rufinus, para. 43.

40. S. Davis, D. Kendall and G. O'Collins (eds.), The Resunection (Oxford: Oxford UP,1997), p. 133.

41. Doctrine in the Church ofEngland, p. 209; The Bishops of the Netherlands, A New Cate(London: Burns and Oates, 1967), pp. 479, 474, 473.

42. The Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, The Mystery of Salvation (London:Church House Publishing, 1996), pp. 10-11.

43. The Mystery of Salvation, pp. 191-2.44. Peter Jupp and Tony Rogers, Interpreting Death (London: Cassell, 1997), Chapter 11.

Paul Badham is Professorof Theology andReligious Studies at University ofWale

Lampeter (This paper was given at a meeting of the British Associationfor the Study


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