Take this scenario: I sin and so I offend God. He is angry with me, and I fear the wrath of God. Then I kneel before him and beg for his forgiveness, saying that I know I have done wrong and do not deserve his friendship; but will he take me back all the same? Then the wrath of God is appeased; he changes his mind and is no longer angry with me.

Now this is a perfectly good story, or picture, of God and ourselves. If we are going to imagine God at all we should sometimes imagine him as very angry—especially angry about injustice to his special people, the poor and the helpless. This is a very important image of God, but it is one image. We have to set this image alongside the image of the God who relents, the God who endures our sin and forgives us all the same.

Daphne Hampson:

Obviously the Christian church is better off with feminists than without feminists. Therefore if one is a feminist and a Christian one should stay in the Christian church and work for change. I do not underestimate what that means: how time and energy consuming, how discouraging and at times undermining it is. I remember well. We need feminists at every point in society, and I have no desire to criticise others who are holding the front at a point where I am not and cannot be. The only reasons for leaving can be that one is too desperately hurt, or that one no longer feels at home within the Christian church and religion. For me the break was not easy. As one thing after another fell away—going to the eucharist, reading the Bible, I came to wonder whether anything would remain. But prayer and a love of God, which were simply too deep in me, held. In some ways I have managed to rebuild. My religion is now more closely integrated with all else I believe about the world than it was before. I have prised apart Christianity and being a religious person—an effort which has taken time and thought and the help of others.

There are two main barriers to Christian faith set up by our twentieth-century secularised culture. The first is the conviction that faith is irrelevant to the real problems of the twentieth century. The second is our inability to accept the reality of a being with powers that transcend our own. These two barriers are very different, the first being very concrete, the second very abstract. Yet they are connected by the Christian belief that we—the citizens of the twentieth century, and the rest of humanity too—are caught in a predicament which only one with powers that transcend our own can overcome.

In this article I want to do two things. I want to give an account of the predicament in which we are caught that will show both that there really is one, and also that it is a predicament that human powers alone are insufficient to overcome. I also want to present an argument to show that at least one notion of a transcendental power (and being) answers to something real and cannot be dismissed as mythical, symbolic or ‘religious’.

The predicament in which we are caught is our inability to create the kind of community that we cannot but desire. To give a better idea of the nature of this community the lack of which constitutes the essence of our predicament, I will give two examples of attempts to achieve it and try to show why they fail.

Some years ago there was a competition in the New Statesman magazine to produce the most startling newspaper headline anyone could think of. Among the winning entries, as I remember, was this: ‘ARCHDUKE FERDINAND STILL ALIVE. FIRST WORLD WAR A MISTAKE’.

A mistake, a war in which 20 million people died? It seems of course preposterous: a bad—if clever—joke. And yet historians now almost universally agree that the First World War was a mistake. Not in the sense implied by that headline, that it was fought for the wrong reasons. No, a mistake in the sense—perhaps even more depressing—that there were no reasons for war at all: except, that is, for the drive to war itself. The great powers had got themselves into a fierce arms race, Germany was being made to feel increasingly encircled; yet rather than seeking obvious remedies—reversing the arms race, or resorting to more positive diplomacy—the generals and the statesmen pushed on towards the cataclysm as if they were no longer masters of their fate.

Today, as we know, there are disturbing parallels. Once again, the great civilisations of the world—the very nations that gave us our literature, music, painting, our ideas of peace and of democracy—are locked into a unending cycle of hostility. Once again there is a grim competition for superiority in arms, in trade, in attitudes, in righteousness.