The good gambler knows where to place his bet. Since eternity is involved, the balance of advantage would still be on the side of choosing to believe in God and your own immortal soul even if the odds against were 100 million to one. I can understand that calculation.
I also understand and admire the immense structures of ritual and teaching and belief that have been constructed over the centuries on the basis of faith in God’s existence and the divinity of Jesus Christ. These are embodied in the great Christian churches of the modern age. God or no God, they are splendid creations of the human spirit.
And of all the Christian churches none is more imposing in its spread and splendour of learning and achievement than the Roman Catholic Church.
Any institution that has endured two thousand years – outlasting empires, defying the tides of history, overcoming lurid scandals, coming through humiliating controversies, still alive, vigorous, and hugely influential – must possess the sort of fundamental intellectual conviction and rigorous moral sensibility which enables it to remain relevant and inspire fervour from age to differing age.
But in recent years a great argument has been raging. On the one side are those who have launched a wide-ranging attack on the dilution of Christian orthodoxy by liberal theologians in the Catholic Church.
They call attention to a modernising movement which holds the following to be almost self-evident: that Jesus died without believing he was Christ or the Son of God; that he knew nothing of the Trinity; that he would have learnt from his mother who his natural father was; and that he taught the imminent arrival of a messianic figure who he never identified with himself. This consensus appears also to include the belief that Jesus’s body remained in its tomb and decomposed there like any other body.
Traditionalists reject such views and object to anyone holding these beliefs calling themselves Catholics. They say that the Church teaches the opposite of all these things. Anyone dissenting from the Church’s approved teachings who remain in it is a fraud.
Another part of this argument involves disputing the rigour of the Church’s teaching on, for instance, artificial contraception, the requirement that priests be celibate, and the exclusion of women from priesthood. What view prevails in these matters will be of immense significance in the future.
To someone brought up as a child in the Catholic Church and retaining an admiration beyond all brain-washing for its intellectual vigour and moral force on many, but certainly not all, issues, I find the arguments fascinating. Since the time when I was young the Church has changed greatly, and so much of the change has been so much for the better. All in all, a greater humanity has entered the teaching and the example of the Catholic Church.
The inflexible disdain for anything non-Catholic and all-too-rigorous, steely, refusal to make allowances for beliefs that smacked of any hint of unorthodoxy – these have gone, to be replaced by a more flexible approach, a greater recognition of how human frailty might be accommodated within the faith.
But the question inevitably arises. How far can increased flexibility and theological liberalism go without changing the Church so fundamentally that the whole essence of what has given it enduring appeal is diluted out of existence?
A great many, I am sure including Pope Benedict himself, would answer that the liberal dilution has gone far and fast enough.
Those seeking even deeper and more fundamental change in the Church think differently and express themselves just as powerfully. They change the metaphor and say with equal fervour that a boat which cannot be vigorously rocked survives no storms.
It will be interesting to see what the future holds. Will reform and re-thinking continue, or will there be a conservative backlash to at least a half-return to rigorous orthodoxy? Perhaps, since we began with Pascal, we should let him have the last word. On both sides, it is the search for truth that matters. “Comfort yourself,” Pascal advised, “you would not seek Him if you had not found Him.”
