No Fixed Address - Faith as Journey by John Bodycomb
The title is intriguing. I have visited John at home and he doesn’t appear to be moving out! But as he explains, one changes through life, and that continues into retirement. The book is part autobiography, part theological analysis, and he has entwined the narrative to give a most readable and stimulating account of his own development, and how that colours his understanding of church and theology.
Congregationalism was part of his family history, and made him always suspicious of creedal churches. In his early youth he was influenced by the spirituality of the nuns in his education, rather than by his later Anglican public school experience, which he cites as an 'unmemorable event'. Later his encounter with a small house meeting based on the Oxford Group led to his conversion, and ultimately ordination.
I am John’s contemporary, and there are many stages in his journey that resonated with me. We both had early periods of love/hate with the church, both struggled through theological school (he Congregationalist, I Anglican), both stimulated by the new thinking of the 50s and 60s, and both caught up in our later lives with interfaith activities. The book made me reach back again for Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and John Robinson. In his chapter, 'This new age of discovery', he cites three quests in which he continues to be engaged—the quest for the historical Jesus, the recognition of religious pluralism, and the conversation between religion and science.
He says that the church today is ill-equipped to explore these concerns. It is a 'falling edifice' of three spires: the deification of Jesus, the proclamation of a singular true faith to the exclusion of other faiths, and an 'ossified pseudo-science' in which matters such as revelation, faith, mystery, authority and tradition are re-interpreted, and used to dismiss critics.
He gives an account of the way his own journey has engaged in these matters with descriptions of the new light he finds in the 'Jesus research', the new links between faith traditions, and the new rapport between science and theology. The book is made very readable by his personal encounters, and by numerous stories that illustrate his conclusions.
There is an excellent chapter on 'Cosmology and the Sacred', with a pithy run-down on the state of the science. This is followed by a whole section analysing the present interchange (including the rise of atheism) between people of faith and people of science. Out of this he draws metaphors for God that give meaning to his life’s journey: 'the restless wind', 'the trusting parent', 'the ocean of being', and (specially) 'the mind of the cosmos'. He concludes with a tribute to the new Christian mysticism as it is found in meditation groups, and among the Quakers.
The bibliography ranges far, but I missed footnotes that would have helped follow up what is a condensed, readable and most challenging book. John, keep on travelling!