Man of what God

Bishop-turned-agnostic Richard Holloway explores how being ‘faith unfaithful’ has kept him ‘falsely true’.

Waiting for the Last for to carry me home”. Sometimes the idea of Paradise is translated to this life and this world: the creation of the perfect society here on Earth. It is never made but the idea of it persists.

“Whether we like it or not,” Holloway writes, “uncertainty seems to be ingrained in the nature of the universe.” We know much more about the universe than any previous generations have known. We can’t even pretend that it’s anthropocentric. Moreover, on account of this ingrained uncertainty, “we can never predict the impact on a human life of events at its earliest or subatomic level. Yet, conscious of our ignorance, we still seek certainty.”

In the last chapter of this book, Holloway arrives at the position he has argued and felt himself towards; one in which he seeks

“to try to live by the story of the magnificent defeat of Jesus, the godforsaken revolutionary”. He admits that “the Church never really tried to live the Jesus-life,” though, one might add, many individuals and even groups of Christians have attempted to do so, at least until they constituted themselves a church. But he recognises the paradox: that without a church – the church – this “Jesus story” and the “Jesuslife” it teaches, would have withered, died, and been lost in the black hole of history. “What the Church did was to keep his story alive. Even as they shifted uncomfortably in their seats, Christians were compelled to listen to it.”

Holloway’s journey has been difficult. Long ago he rejected the comfort of certainty. He has denied much that he was taught. He has been proudly disobedient, while at the same time conscious of the damaging self-satisfaction of proud