Explainer

Belief

Creed

29 May 2023

5 min read

I believe in breadboards: cutting through the meaning of belief

A turn of phrase leads Andrew Steane to consider what we say and what we really mean when we say we believe in something.

Andrew Steane

Andrew Steane has been Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford since 2002, He is the author of Faithful to Science: The Role of Science in Religion.

bread a piece of cutlery rest on a breadboard

Photo by Caio Pezzo on Unsplash.

On holiday with my family around Easter this year, we rented a small cottage and went self-catering. This is a lovely way to enjoy a week, heartily recommended by me, at least.

As anyone who has done it will know, one of the standard experiences of the holiday house is the search of the kitchen for the items you need at mealtime. This year I was looking for a breadboard. You know: a flat wooden board on which to cut a loaf of bread. There did not appear to be one. But there were two marble boards which were plainly cutting boards. I then made a remark to my dear companion and wife Emma, I said,

“I think maybe the owners don’t believe in breadboards”.

This turn of phrase came quite naturally to me. It is a way of speaking that has been common in England for a long time, though it is less prevalent now. As I say, this way of speaking has a long history and it is not about abstract questions of existence. It is about practical questions of usefulness. If someone says:

“I believe in breadboards”

it does not mean

“there is some doubt as to the reality of breadboards, but I think they are real.”

What it means is:

“I think breadboards are useful; I think they help; they are a Good Thing.”

If someone says:

“I don’t believe in breadboards”

it means:

“I don’t think we need breadboards; they don’t help; we can cut bread another way.”

I am interested in this way of speaking because I am interested in what is going on when Christians recite, as many do, the summary statements called creeds, which mostly begin with the phrase “I (or we) believe in God, the Father almighty, creator …”.

I’ll come back to that in a moment. Before I do, let’s note some other ways in which the phrase “believe in” can be used. Sometimes someone may ask “do you believe in ghosts?” The question arises because ghost stories are strange and hard to verify and the very notion of a ghost is questionable, so the question is asking “do you think there is in fact any such thing as a ghost?” It is asking, “are ghosts real?”

And there are other contexts in which statements about belief might be made. Suppose a group of soldiers is cut off after an advance by opposing troops, and they are in doubt as to the way back to their own front line. Maybe the captain is advocating a choice which seems wrong to the private soldiers. They might debate among themselves. In this case, when putting into words his judgement on the matter, a soldier might find himself using the phrase, “I believe in the captain”, or, as the case may be, “I don’t believe in the captain.” Again, it is not a statement about whether there is a captain; it is a statement about whether trust in this particular captain is well-placed.

Now imagine a more homely scenario which has played out in many a household over the years. A daughter is telling her parents about her boyfriend. Perhaps the parents are not quite sure about this young man. They do not know him as well as their daughter does. They want to trust her judgement, but they are hesitating. Is our dear child perhaps a little blinded by infatuation?

What might the daughter say to explain how she feels? Having happily listed the boyfriend’s other good qualities, she might choose to add, “and he believes in me.” What does she mean by that? Is it that there is some doubt as to whether she exists, but the young man thinks she does? Of course not. What she means is that she feels that her friend knows her well enough to see her as she really is, and he affirms what he sees. He affirms that she has something to offer; she herself and not some other person or some other version who is not truly her.

There is a related experience which I have had many times with Emma. When faced with a decision about raising small children (what time should they go to bed? When can they go out on their own? etc.) I have often had the great boon of being able to say to myself “I believe in Emma.” What it means is, I think she has a lot of wisdom and good judgement on this issue, so I don’t need to agonise on it for too long; she has very likely already found a good answer.

Belief is much talked about in life more generally of course. There is the notion (quite dubious I think) that if you “believe” then you can realise whatever hopes and dreams you may have. Sometimes people speak of “belief” when what they really mean is hope. I won’t go into all these usages. The main point of this article is to say that if, in the context of a Christian gathering, you are invited to join in and recite a creed beginning with the phrase “We believe in God” then you do not need to make it function as an abstract statement about reality and existence, the way the question about ghosts functions. This is because “We believe in God” can function much better as a statement about practical helpfulness, like the statement about breadboards.

We Christians believe in God the way we believe in breadboards. We believe in God the way we believe in the good judgement of a close companion. It means we think our life as a community will go better if we pay the right kind of attention to our ultimate context, and the values and possibilities which are held there. We do not use the word “God” to refer to an airy being who might not exist. The word is, rather, a short (arguably too short) way to direct our attention. Our attention is drawn to those aspects of reality which can rightly and properly command the loyalty of a good and wise person. We don’t pretend to completely know what those aspects are. But we want to learn. Our gatherings and our creeds help us to acknowledge and embrace this ultimate context more fully.

Article

Belief

Creed

19 December 2024

6 min read

2024 - the year Christianity bounced back?

From the opinion sites to the churchyard, we’re seeking a better way to live.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A man sits in a church pew below a colourful stained glass window, looking pensive.

Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash.

Was 2024 the year Christianity turned a corner? Throughout the year, on substacks, websites, YouTube videos, and Instagram posts, the signs kept cropping up of what Re-Enchanting co-host Justin Brierley has called the Surprising Rebirth of Faith in God.

Over recent years, and throughout 2024, we have seen a stream of public figures declaring various degrees of interest in Christianity, or even full-on faith. Rowan Williams described the usual suspects well, imagining a scene in an English Churchyard: “Some… have been professed believers (Francis Spufford, Nick Cave, Paul Kingsnorth), some have lingered in the church porch (Tom Holland, Philip Goff), some are still on a bench in the grounds (Alain de Botton).” And there is Ayaan Hirsi Ali (singing along from the pews), Russell Brand (posting Instagram reels from the font?), Louise Perry (on the bench, next to de Botton?), Jordan Peterson (sometimes in the pulpit, sometimes in the porch), and even Richard Dawkins (smiling at the choir’s rendition of Silent Night as he wanders past).

In the USA, it’s similar. Yet more complicated. The alliance of Evangelicalism with Donald Trump is problematic, to say the least. J.D. Vance is a serious Christian, having made the journey from an evangelical church upbringing, through student atheism into Roman Catholicism. Shia LeBoeuf and Candace Owens are among other US celebrities finding faith recently, while academic Rod Dreher’s public journey into Eastern Orthodoxy has been watched by many. On our Re-Enchanting podcast, Molly Worthen is a good example of why, despite everything, sceptics like her can still find faith in the USA.

In the UK’s Assisted Dying debate, the place of religion was a hot topic. The case made against the bill by Christians gained a strong hearing, so much so that secular voices started crying foul, arguing that religious voices should not be heard, or at least, such people should declare their hand (though the number of people starting their case with ‘I’m a secular person, and that may colour my beliefs on this, but…” were hard to find).

In public life, explicitly Christian writers such as Rowan Williams, Elizabeth Oldfield, Nicholas Spencer, Madeline Davies, Giles Fraser and Marcus Walker command an audience, and maybe this website - Seen & Unseen - in its own small way is helping to provide a stronger, more intelligent Christian voice in culture.

Nonetheless, let’s not get carried away. The Assisted Dying bill passed. Despite the celebrity names, numbers going to church continue to fall, and the public assumptions of the culture remain firmly secular.

Recent articles in the Spectator express the dilemma well. A. N. Wilson pens a gloomy assessment of the prospects of Christianity in the west, entitled Is the End of Christendom Nigh?, looking out from his pew on a dwindling local congregation of elderly people, watching the lights go out on Christian culture in the west. Yet at the same time Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes a piece about her second Christmas as a Christian, called A Christian Revival is Under Way. Which is it? Maybe to adjudicate, an editorial, presumably written by its new editor, Michael Gove, entitled In Defence of Faith makes a strong case for Christian faith and its place in national life.

Anecdotally, at the local level, stories abound of people stepping into churches, seeking some kind of meaning in life and re-engaging with faith. Sometimes it’s the powerful emotion of charismatic or Pentecostal worship, sometimes the majesty of cathedrals or the mystery of Orthodox liturgy. Our local church in Oxford has a regular stream of stories of students exploring and finding faith and I keep hearing the same story in churches across the country.

“People need meaning, and the secular world didn’t come up with the goods.”

Nick Cave

My take on this, for what it’s worth, is that western culture has run out of steam, either temporarily or for good. In the twentieth century, both Fascism and Communism rose and fell. Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’ in the triumph of secular, liberal, consumer capitalism. Yet this too has run out of steam, increasingly felt to be spiritually hollow and politically suspect. ‘Woke culture’ was an attempt to restore a set of moral values to restrain the unpleasant and unjust effects of the unbridled market, yet its stridency and aggressiveness, its Canute-like attempt to resist aspects of natural order, not to mention its adoption of a destructive fixation on a reductive identity politics has generated a backlash of its own.

The elections of 2024 were instructive. Keir Starmer won not because he offered a compelling vision but because he said so little. There was no ‘Yes We Can’ Obama slogan, no Blairite ‘New Labour, New Britain’ moment. No-one knew what he stood for, but we were so fed up with the Conservatives that we just wanted them out. Even with Trump in the USA, unlike last time, people knew what they were getting, yet they voted for him anyway, mainly because they felt he would fix the economy and immigration better than the Democrats who had failed on both.

Nick Cave put it well in a recent interview in the Times: “people need meaning, and the secular world didn’t come up with the goods.” The perennial human search for purpose and significance hasn’t gone away, and there is not much on offer in secular culture. So, people are suddenly open to exploring more ancient stores of wisdom.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that just at the time when we might be seeing the stirring of an openness to the spiritual, the numinous and the religious, the Church (at least in the UK - other places may be doing better) seems in no state to capitalise. The Church of England has been absorbed in a lengthy and acrimonious debate over human sexuality and same-sex marriage over the past five years, the Archbishop of Canterbury has had to resign over the Church’s failure to enact a properly functioning safeguarding culture, and the free churches are in free fall.

So, what are the prospects for 2025? Maybe the Church of England can find a settlement in its civil war on sexuality, finding a way for the warring parties to live together, even if it has to be at some distance within the same church for a while. Then we might see which side (or perhaps both in their different ways?) might be better placed to appeal to jaded, secular people who are waking up to the lack of meaning in their lives and the potential of Christian faith to offer a satisfying vision of reality and a new way of living.

Perhaps a new Archbishop of Canterbury might come in, untainted by past safeguarding failures, and, despite the impossibilities of the job, able to steadily steer the church towards its spiritual heart. At the end of his monumental and increasingly influential The Master and his Emissary, neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist (not a Christian himself) makes a telling point: “The Western Church has in my view been active in undermining itself. It no longer has the confidence to stick to its values but instead joins the chorus of voices attributing material answers to spiritual problems.”

Back in 1930, an Anglican lay mystic from Notting Hill, Evelyn Underhill wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Cosmo Lang with words that put their finger on what the Church might need now:

“God”, she wrote “is the interesting thing about religion, and people are hungry for God.” She went on: “We look to the Church to give us an experience of God, mystery, holiness and prayer which, though it may not solve the antinomies of the natural world, shall lift us to contact with the supernatural world and minister eternal life.”

A church that is seen as ‘a dull echo of the liberal consensus’ as the former Bishop of London, Richard Chartres used to say, is hardly worth the candle. If the message of the church is a vaguely religious version of what you can already find in the Guardian (or the Telegraph for that matter) then why bother with it?

As Rod Dreher put it recently: “only the return of strong religion - one that makes demands, offers compelling explanations to the problems of death and suffering, and gives worshippers a visceral sense of connecting to the living God - has any hope of competing in the post Christian marketplace.”

In 2024, religion in general and Christianity in particular has never been far from the front pages, for better or worse. God has not gone away. Dreher may well be right. And the Church, if it is to make the most of a season where troubled people are beginning to look its way again may need to take notice.