[345.2] SYMBOLS OF HOPE AND CONFLICT

My colleague Jonathan Bartley will be on BBC Radio 4's Today programme tomorrow (around 06.50 a.m.), arguing the case for white as well as red poppies in remembering the war dead and victims of conflict. He is also being syndicated on IRN. In an article in tomorrow's Church Times, he writes: "The Christian tradition, and specifically the crucifix, have a great deal in common with the poppy. Both are linked to sacrifice. Both take a location of bloodshed and violence and make a statement about it. And both attempt to give us hope in the face of death. They imply that those who died did not do so in vain.

"But whilst apparently banned from wearing one symbol of hope (the cross), public figures in Britain are simultaneously urged, indeed in many cases, required, to wear another (the red poppy) – almost as an article of faith. There is a 'political correctness' about the red poppy, which often goes unnoticed.

"But there is a crucial difference between the red poppy and the crucifix. Whilst the red poppy implies redemption can come through war, the Christian story implies that redemption comes through nonviolent sacrifice. The white poppy is much more Christian, in that respect, than the red variety.

"The historical alignment of churches with Governments and the national interest has meant that churches have often giving their blessing to war. However as was seen over their widespread opposition to the invasion of Iraq, churches are increasingly willing to oppose military action, as churches become less aligned with both the state and British culture.

"Whether you are from a 'Just War', or a pacifist tradition, Christians believe that there is no redemption in war. Churches, who host so many services of remembrance, should at least give people the choice, and make white poppies more widely available, alongside red ones.

"The crucial question is not whether we should remember. The question is how we should remember. And how we answer this question affects not just the memory of those who died, but those who are still dying in wars around the world."

[06.06 AM] Haggard revelation exposes evangelical confusion about sexuality (a report and opinion piece).

[345.1] A TALENT TO DISTURB

Would Jesus demand privileged treatment? Colin M. Morris questions some current religious special pleading... Before moving on to work with the BBC, Morris was President of the Methodist Conference, and before that a "turbulent priest" involved as a missionary involved in Zambia's struggle for independence, justice and dignity. Out of that crucible came some radical and highly contextual theological reflections: provocations which certainly inspired me in my youth, trying to make the connection between faith and politics. I'm glad he hasn't lost his dissenting edge, unlike so many church figures who move from the margins to the corridors of power (or at least, the corridors that pass the offices of power).

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[344.1] BOTH YEARNING AND AFFIRMING

These days I'm constantly finding myself pointing out that as a generic descriptor, 'religion' is an ethnographic trope for a certain kind of anthropological instrumentalism - one that rapidly becomes meaningless to the point of disinformation when you stretch it to include both Theravāda Buddhism and Jerry Falwell, say. (Richard Dawkins, please take note). But as a word denoting a set of impulses towards the world, it begins to acquire meaning. As Dutch missiologist Bert Hoedemaker has suggested - 'religion' can be thought of, in these terms, as our primal response to the contigency and waywardness of life, while its partner 'rationality' is about how we order the world in workable ways. 'Faiths' are thus organised attempts to build bridges between these two, to construct - on the basis of observation and intuition - inhabitable negotiations between our simultaneous senses of displacement and placement. (We have these congruent and contradictory experiences of life whether we care to define ourselves as 'religious' or not, by the way.)

Of course religious impulses, as primal expressions of this kind, can be fearful or hopeful, life-giving or life-substitututing. They are not neutral. Nor are they all 'one type of thing'. Religiosity is plural and complex. Writing out of a radical Christian tradition, here is a positive construal of what it can mean from the late Dorothee Soelle, one of the important theological voices of the second half of the twentieth century. When I read it, it reminds me why I and others feel so 'unaccounted for' in a book as sadly simplistic as The God Delusion:

The religious need is the need for experienced meaning, the yearning for a truth that has been promised and that is becoming increasingly visible. Religion is the attempt to regard nothing in this world as alien, hostile to human beings, a matter of fate, without meaning. Religion is the attempt to change everything that is experienced and encountered in all of life and to integrate it totally into a humane world. Everything should be interpreted in such a way that it becomes something ‘for us’. Everything that is rigid should become flexible; everything that is change, necessary; everything that appears to be meaningless should be regarded and believed to be true and good. Religion is the attempt to tolerate no nihilism and to live an unending and unrefutable affirmation of life.

From Dorothee Soelle, The Inward Road and the Way Back, translated by David L. Scheidt (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979).

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[343.1] SECURITY AND SAFETY

"To live securely is to know no enemy can endanger our deepest values, but for physical safety there are no guarantees. For us to live in fear and anger might suit the agendas of some politicians, but it's hard to imagine that kind of life being labeled 'secure.' " (Johan Maurer)

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[342.3] BLAIR CONFUSED ON CREATIONISM

There's no problem, according to the PM. Which is one way of letting it burrow away until it becomes more of one. Gee, thanks Tony! My response on behalf of Ekklesia indicates why the issue of teaching deformed Bible study in science lessons is one we shouldn't ignore - better to get it sorted out, and move on. The parliamentary statement from the Schools Minister Jim Knight on 1 November 2006 was a step in the right direction, and we are in conversation with DfES too. There will be more in the Times Educational Supplement on Friday. Meanwhile, some background on recent developments can be found here. See also Rob Blackhurst's piece in the Financial Times Magazine (Who are you calling old?), tracking a creationist on his UK 'educational tour'. I'm quoted in it, and I also contributed some wider research.

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[342.2] THE THREAT OF CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE

Back in July 2006, my colleague Jonathan Bartley's book Faith and Politics After Christendom included an observation-cum-prediction that some extreme and reactive Christians, frustrated with the pace of Christendom's demise and their consequent disenfranchisement in the corridors of power, might end up considering or using violence to assert themselves, as elsewhere in the world (the bombing of abortion clinics, for instance). On Friday we published What are the chances of a holy war?, partly in response to the row about the BBC TV drama 'Spooks'. Then yesterday, The Sunday Telegraph included this piece by John Wynne-Jones: Christians ask if force is needed to protect their religious values.

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[342.1] AN ELITIST FUNNY-BONE?

Over on Shiny Shelf, where a couple of my friends are regular contributors, pleasure-surfing the pop culture zeitgeist, Eddie Robson has a good piece on two decent 'n' recent TV comedies, 'Extras' (BBC2) and 'Lead Balloon' (BBC4). Among other things, he notes: The argument over whether the comedy of humiliation has run its course still goes on, but it features in both of these sitcoms and whereas recent episodes of ‘Extras’ have far overstepped the cringe mark, I’ve found the style to be deftly handled in ‘Lead Balloon’. The pettiness of Jack Dee’s character, Rick Spleen, and his propensity to become obsessed with minor inconveniences, owes a substantial debt to ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’. Eddie also contends that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Marchant's traducing of BBC1 lowest-common-denominator sit coms in 'Extras' series 2 is too easy and, frankly, slickly uninformative - quite apart from being a dubious example of literati mean-spiritedness. I agree on that, though personally I've found E2 much funnier than series one. I like to think that the excesses of comedic cruelty (as with cartoon-style portrayals of violence) serve to highlight the absurdity of the real thing, rather than to endorse it. But perhaps that's wishful thinking. The fatuousness of a lot of celeb-axiomised life is certainly enough to make many of us want to pick up the cultural equivalent of a blunderbuss (Charlie Brooker or 'whitened sepulchres', anyone?). But it doesn't make it right... though in skilful hands it is likely to prove cathartically satisfying for one's noir side. The review also welcomes the BBC's policy of nurturing offbeat comedy material on their new channels, allowing the material to find the audience, rather than always requiring writers and performers to pitch big and brassy. Amen to that. Rage against the machine. Nicely, though. [Pic: Jack Dee]

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[341.1] MORE TAKES ON RICHARD DAWKINS

I have made a number of modifications to my own response on Ekklesia, especially in the footnotes, which seek to illuminate some of the many methodological confusions in his 'anti-God talk'. There is a thoughtful review from Bishop David Atkinson of Thetford on Fulcrum (I worked with him both in Southwark and during my CTBI days, lovely man - a scientist by background. I am less disposed towards onto-theological definitions, however). See also Jim Holt writing in the magazine of the New York Times; The Fear of Religion by philosopher Thomas Nagel in The New Republic; Dawkins the Dogmatist by Andrew Brown in Prospect magazine; 'Is God a Delusion? Atheism and the meaning of life' [download MP3] by Alister McGrath, author of Dawkins' God (Blackwell, 2004) - reviewed with generosity by the secularist Dan O'Hara here. Have a look also at McGrath's St Edmund's (Cambridge) public lecture, Has science disproved God?, which includes a detailed critique of arguments Dawkins has subsequently repeated in TGD. His comments on Dawkins' failures of reasoning, grounded in the history and philosophy of science, are well argued and astute. On 'religious language' and its discontents, incidentally, see this fine thought-piece by Catharine Madsen. It is the editorial from the latest issue of CrossCurrents, the journal of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life. There's a Dawkins discussion on their board, which has an unusually high proportion of light to heat (based on what I've been reading elsewhere, which is frankly rather depressing). Also a thread on rationality in relation to belief. Meanwhile, Howard Jacobsen has a pastiche of Dawkins' on the Decalogue in the Independent (06.11.06, subscription), and Mary Riddell, herself an avowed non-believer, avers intelligently that Dogmatic atheism will never trump religion, while equally sensibly calling for a separation of church and state (Observer).

[340.1] ON NOT RESPONDING IN KIND

Having read and re-read Terry Eagleton's response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion several times, I still think that it's one of the better reviews that I've seen. But it doesn't really get beyond the (supposedly righteous) anger Dawkins' book flows from, and is evidently designed to illicit. Yes, it's hard for those of us with a lifetime's familiarity with theology not to feel annoyed and frustrated at the crude caricatures that the holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair parades - not quite in the spirit of the 'public understanding' that his Oxford post is otherwise meant to uphold in the realm of science, but as part of an (over?) personal anti-religious crusade.

I came across a response to Eagleton via the rationalist site, Butterflies and Wheels, which takes its name from an injudicious attack on Dawkins by the philosopher Mary Midgely. She 'dismissed him back', and though she has valid things to say about his speculative shortcomings, she managed to get him rather wrong in terms of what he says about natural selection - thus opening herself up to a volley of return fire. Not much mutual listening or comprehension there. A similar pattern reproduces itself on the website, though. B&W has some interesting stuff on it, but much of it is the kind of overconfident dissing that seems to me to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Plus it can be utterly self-assured (and impatient) in what it is willing to bracket as 'nonsense'. (I speak as someone who has, of course, committed these sins myself, and therefore in a repentant mode.)

Recognising that, I still thought it might be worth trying to point out (see comments at the end) that when Terry Eagleton uses narrative to refer to God, he isn't necessarily violating the idea that God is beyond description - since (as a life-long literary and cultural critic) he certainly understands the metaphoricity of language, and the distinction between reference and description. The bridge between these two is phenomenology, though it is a bridge which we can never actually cross, except (it could be argued) in moments of ego-displacing prayer or self-giving.

Needless to say, I didn't get anywhere. Within a certain sphere of the rationalist mindscape there is an utter determination to reduce God to a 'provable proposition', and to believe that the 'technical' language used to do this can somehow escape the anthropomorphism that is a characteristic of all language (in different ways), because it is , well, er, a human activity. This is a point Nicholas Lash keeps coming back to in suggesting that a consciously metaphoric use of language about God (biblical imsages, say) might end up being less self-deceptive, in recognising its obvious limitations, than much apparently sophisticated 'speculative' talk which claims 'truly' to demarcate what it refers to. That is especially true for those of us who think traditional metaphysics is a dead end, incidentally, but who do not thereby abandon logic.

Anyway, although I clearly didn't get this thought recognised within the discussion (much of which remains solidly dismissive) a useful lesson was (re)learned by me in the process. Don't respond in kind, if you can help it. Unless the 'kind' involved is both illuminative and, hopefully, kind. It's a hard lesson to take, of course; rather like acknowledging that you aren't (and shouldn't be) in charge of discourse. So, in congruence with a couple of other agendas I'm pursuing at the moment, I decided to see how I might 'take Dawkins on board' in a different sort of way - with this: Turning God into a disaster area Nov 4, 2006; Simon Barrow says Dawkins is right to attack facile God-talk. See what you think. I probably only half-'succeeded', at best. But there I go again ;-)

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[12.01 GMT] "Jesus does not refuse to assert power and authority; rather, he refuses to be powerful according to the world’s greed for control and domination. The power of Jesus is love that will suffer on behalf of others." (Caroline Westerhoff)

[339.1] RE-LEARNING HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS

Like the words ecumenical and ecology , economics is rooted in the Greek [New Testament] word oikos , meaning household , and signifies the management of the household—arranging what is necessary for well-being. Good economic practice—positive ways of exchanging goods and services—is about the well-being, the livelihood, of the whole household. . . . While the notion of “home” in American culture has shrunk from meaning one's town or region to meaning only one's own house or apartment, at the same time, paradoxically, it has become less possible to isolate our individual households from the world around them. As we try to defend the security of our private home, we are simultaneously rediscovering the economic-ecological truth of our profound interdependence within the small planet home we share.

Sharon Daloz Parks (1997), quoted in Plain Living: A Quaker Path to Simplicity, by Catherine Whitmire (Notre Dame, Indiana, Sorin Books, 2001).

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[338.1] SEEKING THE PAIN OF AUTHENTICITY

This powerful observation from an interview with the late Anthony Bloom, speaking from an Eastern Orthodox perspective (hat-tip to Johan Maurer):

"It seems to me that today the whole Christian world... has distanced itself terribly from the simplicity, integrity, and the joyful beauty of the Gospel. Christ and his group of disciples created a Church that was so deep and wide and complete that it could contain the universe. Over the centuries we've made the church into one human social group among many. We're now something less than the world we live in, and when we talk about that world coming to Christ, we are talking about everyone, as many as possible, becoming members of that limited social group. That's our sin, it seems to me.

"...[W] stand accused in this world. In its rejection of God and the church, the world says, "You Christians cannot give us anything we need. You don't offer us God, you offer us a worldview. And it's a moot point if God is not at its core. You give us instructions on how to live, but they're just as arbitrary as the ones other people give us." We ourselves must become Christian--Christians according to the example of Christ himself, and his disciples. Only then will the Church obtain, not power, that is the capacity to coerce, but authority, the capacity to say words that make the soul tremble and that open up the eternal depths within any soul.

"... We confess faith in Christ, but we've reduced everything to symbols. So, for example, I'm always struck by our Good Friday service: instead of the cross on which a living young man dies, we have a wonderful service that can move us but that actually stands between us and that rude and ghastly tragedy ... Of course that reworking does reach us, but we so easily begin to get a taste for that horror, even deeply experiencing it, being shaken and then regaining our calm; whereas the vision of a living person who is murdered is something quite different. That remains as a wound in the soul, you don't forget it; having seen it, you'll never again be the same as you were. And that is what dismays me. In some sense, the beauty and depth of our worship must break it open, and must lead every believer through that opening to the terrible and majestic secret of what is actually happening."

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[02.19 AM] Politics is bigger than the parliamentary game - in a comment column reproduced on Ekklesia and in the latest Third Way magazine, Simon Barrow asks what really happens when Christians 'join the party'.

[337.1] IDENTIFYING DAWKINS' DELUSIONS

It's not the gentlest piece of writing, but doyen literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, a sceptic once associated with the radical Catholic 'Slant' agenda, has written an appropriately devastating review of Richard Dawkins' best-seller, The God Delusion, in the ever-stimulating London Review of Books. No mere 'religious troll' he; I thoroughly recommend Eagleton's Figures of Dissent (Verso, 2003) - which celebrates and excavates the intellectual awkward squad. Everyone from The Frankfurt School to Slavoj Zizek, via Wittgenstein, Northrop Frye, W. B. Yeats, Stanley Fish, Norberto Bobbio and a cast of other unlikely and angular characters.

For his LRB polemic, Eagleton begins: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster."

Terry Eagleton is the John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester. His latest book is How to Read a Poem.

[Graphic (c) The Guardian. With grateful acknowledgment]

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[336.1] ACCOUNTING FOR THE SHAPE OF HOPE

Occasionally I get sent surveys or asked research questions. Sometimes they are quite complex, at other times deceptively simple. My instinct is to feel sympathy for anyone so down on their luck that they seriously think I’m going to illuminate their darkness. But that’s just an inverted form of arrogance, so I usually try to offer something back. A couple of weeks ago I was asked if I could provide “abbreviated responses to the following questions: what is Christian faith? What does it mean to be a Christian?”

Er… right. No getting out of that one. Or is there? The former Archbishop of York, John Habgood, was once asked by a popular magazine for a simple twelve-word definition of Christianity. He refused to respond on the grounds that a proper answer could not be trivialised in this way. He had a point, but ended up sounding unbearably pompous. On the other hand, Karl Barth, one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century (whatever you make of his theology), was not too proud to respond to a similar enquiry by quoting, without embarassment, a children’s hymn: “Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so.”

It is immediately obvious to me (as to you, I’m sure) that I possess neither the status of Habgood nor the humble wisdom of Barth. But I decided to have a go, anyway. Fools, angels, daring to tread – you get the picture. I’ll tackle the first question today, and the second one tomorrow or the day after. Just to be predictable. And my initial response, below, is unashamedly modelled on the (shorter) answer that David E. Jenkins gave when pinned down by a group of students. You can look up the original in God, Jesus and Life in the Spirit (SCM Press), one of the trilogy of essay-collections he compiled partly in response to ‘the Bishop of Durham Affair’, during which his off-the-cuff comments about aspects of Christian doctrine were reduced to those unfair media stereotypes that have followed him ever since. But that’s another story. Anyway, the Christian faith, from my point of view, might reasonably be crystallised in these four short statements:

God is.
God is as we meet God in Jesus
(life embracing death and transforming it into love)
Therefore there is hope.

The world is.
The world is what it is in the Spirit's gift
(renewing energy in the face of decay).
Therefore there is value.

Persons are.
Persons are what they are in God’s image
(freed from all fixed forms and ideologies)
Therefore there is a future.

The church is.
The church realises itself as peaceable community
(a fallible experiment in forgiveness)
Therefore there is purpose.

Yup, this begs a lot of questions, I know. Confessions are never the final word (which doesn’t belong to us, and is abused when we think it does). They are an invitation to hopeful-but-critical experimentation. So over to you…

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[335.1] INTERFACING FAITH AND CULTURE

I see that a network within the Methodist Church in Great Britain has launched a new weblog aimed at providing a general discussion forum for people interested in the connections and interaction between Christianity and culture. It's called Interface, and contains sections on arts/entertainment, the environment, politics, religion, science/medicine and social issues. Nothing too notable or in-depth on there at the moment; but it looks accessible and is, as yet, in its online infancy. They are seeking more female commentators, especially. Web punditry seems to be a bit of a 'guy thing', and as yet (sadly) women hold up much less than half the cyber-sky. Or maybe it isn't sad at all, just sane {cough}. There's currently an on-site poll on whether 'virtual churches', like St Pixels, are valid alternatives to actual church communities. I wouldn't mind betting that the responses to that question are gendered in a particular way, too...

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[334.1] PRESSING THOSE CONVICTION BUTTONS

This weekend saw two constrasting forays into the 'religion and public life' debate. The first was a call (by the Evangelical Alliance UK) for Prince Charles to guard his cudgels as Defender of the Christian (and, specifically, Protestant) Faith at his Coronation. The second was, contrastingly, a feature in The Sunday Times asking whether it is time to take 'God out of the state' altogether. In this context Ekklesia is urging a radical change in the way that the debate about religion and politics is framed. Well, actually, we've been urging it for some time. But those who get an adrenalin buzz from a simple, brutal clash between two lumbering monsters called 'belief' and 'secularity' continue to make much of the running, unsurprisingly. This is because most public argument about religion (actually an ethnographic fiction which disguises as much as it reveals) has become pretty much tone-deaf to nuance, and is therefore ready prey for the mutually reinforcing rhetorics of self-assertion and other-bashing. It's neither an edifying nor a life-giving standoff for any concerned, be they wearers of religious or anti-religious clothing. But it will continue until and unless we can find ways of resourcing the 'debate' with more light and less heat, more engaged humanity and less homogenizing abstraction.

One of the subterranean consequences of the demise of Christendom in the West, of course, is that people both outside and inside church communities have increasingly lost touch with the depth of the language of faith - substituting for it (in some quarters) a blithe assumption that it amounts to little more than a child's comforter, and (in others) that it subsists in the knock-down authority of the Bible, the magesterium, or some very tribal version of religious imagination. Here lies the road to nowhere. Somehow this glorious noticeboard blooper [see picture] sums up where we're all at. Hopefully we'll start to get the joke - and realise that it may be on us.

Meanwhile, on the matter of confusing God and governance, haven't faith groups and secularists yet noticed that civil society exists precisely to provide a mediating space between state power and communities of conviction? And what is the EA on about? It claims to exist for the sake of 'biblical truth'. So how come it is urging Christians to put their trust in princes and their realms, rather than the Lamb Who was Slain (by the powers-that-be, lest we forget)? Neither reason nor the New Testament seem to get much of a look-in.

It's all very odd...

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[19.34 GMT] APOLOGIES to those of you trying to get through to Ekklesia on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Due to a server problem at our ISP, the site was down for a full 48 hours. There have been a number of shorter 'outages' of late. We are looking at the possibility of a new host. Meanwhile, I've just got from a fascinating trip to Brussels and Bruges, accompanying a group of Anglican clergy from the South of England as they reflected on what "a soul for Europe" might look like in the light of EU expansion... My paper, 'A European state of mind?' is currently going through a remix after some useful discussions.

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[333.1] THE GOD WHO ABANDONS US TO EXCESSIVE LOVE

W. H. Auden, without doubt one of my favourite wordsmiths, famously observed that the true poet is a person unreservedly in love with language. That ought to be profoundly true of the theologian, too - one committed to the precious beauty of the fleshly Word. Of course there's an inherent paradox here. To speak of God, we need language which continually exceeds what can be said, in order to portray (but never capture) the truth that God is beyond all we can imagine, say, believe or disbelieve. On the other hand, the theologian is also there to point out that the radically new language is actually that which we surprisingly inherit - not just something we arbitrarily make-up. And, crucially, (s)he is there to help Christian speech to find ways of distinguishing between faith and fantasy, praise and pathology. To explore, in the helpful formulation of my friend Johan Maurer, "examples of people using Christian rhetoric either to seek or to avoid reality".

Both Auden and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to whom the following famous poem is dedicated, were involved in precisely such a vocation, in startlingly contrasting ways. Friday's Child is about the breathtaking implications of God's refusal of force. I consider the limitations of the male pronoun a necessary chastisement...

He told us we were free to choose
But, children as we were, we thought---
"Paternal Love will only use
Force in the last resort

On those too bumptious to repent."
Accustomed to religious dread,
It never crossed our minds He meant
Exactly what He said.

Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves,
But it seems idle to discuss
If anger or compassion leaves
The bigger bangs to us.

What reverence is rightly paid
To a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom He made
Perform the Acts of God?

It might be jolly if we felt
Awe at this Universal Man
(When kings were local, people knelt);
Some try to, but who can?

The self-observed observing Mind
We meet when we observe at all
Is not alariming or unkind
But utterly banal.

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

Since the analogies are rot
Our senses based belief upon,
We have no means of learning what
Is really going on,

And must put up with having learned
All proofs or disproofs that we tender
Of His existence are returned
Unopened to the sender.

Now, did He really break the seal
And rise again? We dare not say;
But conscious unbelievers feel
Quite sure of Judgement Day.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.

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