The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[CH] One of these, the Bishop of Carlisle, is apparently about to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Now, this is extraordinary. This is supposed to be the mild and reflective and thoughtful and rather troubled church making fanatical pronouncements! Well, I want to hear what Allister McGrath is gonna to write to the Bishop of Carlisle, not to me. Is he going to say, my Lord Bishop, do you not realise what a complete idiot you're making of yourself and of our church? Did he do this? If he did it in private I am not impressed. He has to say it in public.

[RD] The Bishop of Carlisle backtracked.

[CH] Why are they telling me that? I will judge the church by the statements of its

bishops, I think I'm allowed to.

[RD] Yeah, but the other thing is that never mind about the academic theologians, bishops and vicars who will attack us for taking scriptures, or for accusing people of taking scriptures literally, and "of course we don't believe the Book of Genesis literally", and yet they do preach about what Adam and Eve did as though they did exist, as though there's somehow … it’s a sort of license to talk about things which they know and anybody of any sophistication knows is fiction. And yet they will treat their congregations, their sheep, as though they did exist, as though they were factual, and a huge number of those congregations actually think they did exist.

[DD] Can you imagine any one of these preachers saying, as such a topic is introduced, ‘this is a sort of theoretical fiction’?

[RD] Yes.

[DD] It’s not true but it’s a very fine metaphor. No, they'd never … they’re just not going …

[RD] they kind’ve, after the fact imply that that’s what they expect you to know.

[DD] Yes but they would never announce …

[SH] Well there's another point there. It is that they never admit how they have come to stop taking it literally because you have all these people criticising us for our crass literalism, we’re as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists, and yet these moderates don't admit how they have come to be moderate. What does moderation consist of? It consists of having lost faith in all of these propositions, or half of them because of the hammer blows of science and secular politics …

[DD] of the crass literalism of the critics.

[SH] Yeah. Religion has lost its mandate on a thousand questions and moderates tend to argue that this is somehow a triumph of faith, that faith is somehow self-enlightening, whereas it’s been enlightened from the outside. It has been intruded on by science.

[CH] On that point that I was wanting to raise myself, about our own so-called fundamentalism, there's a cleric in Southwark, the first person I saw attacking you and I in print as being just as fundamentalist as those who blew up the London Underground, do you remember his name?

[RD] No, I don't remember his name.

[CH] Sorry, I don't remember. He’s a very senior Anglican cleric in the diocese of Southwark. I went on the BBC with him just entre parentheses I'll say, when I've said, ‘how can you call your congregation a flock? doesn't that say everything about your religion? that you think they're sheep? He said, "Well actually I used to be a pastor in New Guinea, where there aren't any sheep". Well of course there’re a lot of places where there aren't any sheep! Gospel’s quite hard to teach, as a result. We've found out what the most important animal to the locals was and I remember very well my local bishop rising to ask the Divine One to ‘behold these swine’, his new congregation. But this is the man who deliberately does a thing like that, that’s as cynical as you could wish and as adaptive as the day is long, and he says that we who doubt it are as fundamentalist as people who blow up their fellow citizens on the London Underground. It’s unconscionable. Thus, I don't really mind being accused of ridiculing, or treating with contempt, people like that. I just frankly have no choice, I have the faculty of humour, and some of it has an edge to it, I'm not going to repress that, for the sake of politeness of people.

[DD] Would you think that it would be good to make a distinction between the professionals and the amateurs? I share your impatience with the officials of the churches, the people whose … this is their professional life. It seems to me, they know better.

[SH] Right.