From The Times July 21, 2007



As Bishop for the Church of England in Europe I am privileged to visit many significant places. Last month I found myself in what were at first sight two very contrasting contexts. Early in June I was in Geneva and was taken to visit CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, where a huge accelerator is under construction that will enable experiments to be conducted into fundamental particles, the sub-atomic world of energy at the heart of seemingly solid matter, and which can also provide us with understanding of the origins of the Universe. The great accelerator is being assembled from parts made across the world with a precision that enables them to fit perfectly and completely together – an image of human communion and cooperation that is startling in a world which is so often divided. When lowered, again with wonderful precision, into the circular tunnel, several kilometres in diameter, this extraordinary machine will enable physicists to search for the Higgs particle – a particle believed to exist but which has not yet definitively been shown to exist. So from beginning to end this experiment, and the huge cost of the equipment needed for it, is a work of faith.

It was Michael Polanyi, the philosopher of science, who recognised that for a scientist to test a new hypothesis they had to have faith in that hypothesis. Faith seeking understanding was as true of science as of religion, though a faith that was indeed a reasonable faith shaped by compelling evidence. Belief, he argued, was the source of all knowledge. “Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things.” We need what he called “a fiduciary framework” if we are to have any knowledge. Without it, knowledge is impossible. As St Augustine said: “I believe in order that I may understand.”

A few weeks later I spent some time in Romania, an Orthodox country, which suffered much under the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. As with Russia, there has been a renaissance of religion after the fall of communism. Orthodoxy is deeply rooted in the identity of that country; it is a significant example of what Newman said about living religion – it is “a mould in which nations have been cast”. What gives a country identity is an overarching story with a transcendent reference that explicitly and implicitly binds people together. “Religion”, after all, means that which binds. When that “overarching story” becomes merely a matter of opinion, societies dissolve. In the Book of Proverbs we read that “where there is no vision the people perish” –or, as the Hebrew more precisely means, “the people unravel”. Without a shared faith and a shared vision springing from an understanding of human nature and human flourishing that encompasses life and death, sin and redemption, we are reduced to merely political arrangements.

We have to live by faith, for we can live in no other way. The question is, in what shall we put our faith? The seductive attractions of advertisers, the many gods and lords of fashion, of possessions that possess us, the addictions that undermine our human integrity, all compete for our allegiance. In the end, the Christian gospel teaches us that the God who is love, and who comes down to the lowest part of our need, is the God who made us for Himself. “You are made to love, as the sun is to shine,” said that sunniest of poet-priests, Thomas Traherne. When my niece says in her wedding today the simple words “I will” to her husband, and two young people give themselves to each other “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death is do part” they will witness to their faith in the God of love made known in Jesus Christ and an openness to the reality of His transforming grace. When the distraught and weeping Mary Magdalen, whom the Church commemorates tomorrow, heard in the garden on the first Easter Day her name called by the Risen Christ, her life was turned around. She was caught up into the life of the new creation of the God who is the conqueror of sin and death, and was told to share the good news of that new creation. It was that faith and that good news that shaped England and Europe, and has shaped countless lives and still has power to do so today.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe

Peace to you,
Vicky