The New Year is traditionally a time for a whole plethora of mixed emotions. Some of these emotions relate to the past and may include a sense of regret or disappointment.  There may also be positive feelings of achievement or success in the face of challenge.  The word ‘new’ evokes for us emotions about the future, both good and bad.  The future possesses an ambiguity.  Alongside hope and excitement there is also a sense of dread of the unknown.  We welcome the new but at the same time we cannot avoid, to a degree, fearing it.

As I was thinking about this idea of newness, especially in its positive aspects, I realised that some people cannot see to welcome the future and the newness that comes into their lives.  I am not here thinking of those who face life-limiting events like injury, poverty or illness. There is a further group of people who take limited pleasure in any thought about the newness of the future.  For this cohort, the idea of change or newness is received as potentially undermining their pattern of life. These individuals have adopted a type of rigid thinking in political or religious matters, and this makes anything new at best uncomfortable and at worst a threat.  A sterility of thought has been adopted which prevents this group from being open to any kind of newness entering their minds.  They are paid-up members of the ‘what I always say’ brigade.  They keep company with the millions of MAGA Americans who blindly follow an authoritarian leader into the desert of mindless and intellectually bankrupt mental inactivity.  The word conservative is applied to such people, though we might find this adjective rather weak as a description of individuals who refuse ever to be open to new ideas and ways of understanding.  The reward they receive for this static outlook is a sense of emotional and intellectual security.  The price that must be paid in adopting this stance is the absence of any joy in celebrating newness or the excitement of discovering fresh horizons of thought and insight.  Instead, such people live within the rigid embrace of the past and the value systems that have been handed down to them.  Newness is a contradiction of what they know and believe.  Among religious conservatives there are many who hold that truth is locked up within a single text. The permitted way of reading that text makes no provision or allowance for change. I mentioned, when discussing the defining beliefs of UCCF, how puzzled I was by the attachment to a compulsory statement of beliefs from the 19^th century.  This must be reaffirmed today by current members without deviation or change. I felt in myself a claustrophobia, a drowning sensation, by the idea that such a list could ever form the basis of my faith.  If I was compelled to affirm such a list, would I also have to turn my back on the wondrous complexity and creativity of Christian revelation that has taken place over 2000 years in every part of the globe?  The enforcers of such a document (among them many leaders of the influential con-evo constituency in the Church of England) seem to be insisting on such a stance.   They are saying in effect: ‘Here there is safety but no newness.  You are not permitted to think outside the box of defined statements.  Loyalty, obedience and correct thinking are demanded of you as the price of membership to our club.  Thinking in any other way is strictly forbidden.’

The attempt to hold conservative Christians inside the ghetto of ‘orthodoxy’ is probably far less successful than the leaders of these groups would like to think.   Policing the thinking of all the members of a congregation is an impossible task.  The current polarisation in the Church of England over attitudes to same-sex relationships would appear to suggest that entire congregations are all in tune with their leaders as to what they think.   That is improbable.   The other factor is that everyone, Christians and non-believers alike who live in our world, are automatically caught up in the wide maelstrom of evolving ideas, fashions and new ways of thinking that are constantly appearing.   In other words, we are all good at adjusting to the new.  In science, industry or human thought, ideas and inventions appear with breath-taking speed. Scientific invention is not an area where I have any speciality, but there is one feature of great inventions and discoveries that I marvel at. This is the fact that in many cases, great ideas seem to occur in more than one place at the same time.  In the case of the telephone, the light bulb and other experimenters with electric power, there seems to have been, almost literally, a race to the patent office.  Something similar seems to have been going on in the 5^th century BC in the Ancient World or 15^th century Italy.  Dozens of artists emerged simultaneously enriching our world enormously.  Discovery feels like an unstoppable process which catches up everyone somewhere in its wake.  Newness and our participation in that newness is part of being human, though there are different expressions of change according to where in the world you live.  We can also see that certain ideas which are commonplace today simply could not have been articulated even ten years earlier. Specialists from every discipline seem to have some part in thinking about or maybe even participating in this process of working out the next new idea.  It may be a genuine discovery, a fashion idea or a new literary trend.  The world of the new is an exciting place to live in.  Among Christians, only members of the Amish community make a serious attempt to resist the new as a way of being faithful to their Christian convictions.  Most of the rest of us are content to play a full part in living in (and enjoying) the modern world which welcomes newness and change.

There is a group of active Christians who are largely ignored by much of the Church so that many people in the pew are not aware of their existence.  The group I am speaking about are the phalanx of researchers and theological professionals.  For a brief time in the past, I was involved in academic research while knowing that I was never aiming to become a lecturer or teacher.  But one thing that my research period gave me was a deep respect for the task of academics in theological faculties around the country, even though their work is ignored and even despised by many in the Church.  

Academic theologians and those who work at the leading-edge of research activity are not asking the rest of us always to agree with or even understand their discoveries and insights. They are simply asking us to accept that in their theological research, new concepts and new insights are always emerging.  This process of seeing newness in theology, as in every other area of knowledge, is a valid one. It is saying that creativity and fresh thinking is part of theology and faith as it is in every other area of human learning.  Attempts by leading evangelical Christians in Britain to draw congregations and individuals into a new conservative grouping which seems to deny newness and change, is an attempt to fly in the face of reality.  Any church or congregation which sets its face against change is likely to be seen as sterile by a new generation.  A reactionary approach to theology in the name of safety and orthodoxy cannot ultimately prevail.  The Church needs to draw on the creative and exciting energy that is found in the thinking of those who embrace the future as well as in the radical changes in society that are constantly being shown us day by day.  Engaging intelligently with the new and the future is part of the task of academic thinkers and ordinary folk alike.  Do Christians really want to be identified with those who try to push back the tide, or can they engage enthusiastically with the new and what lies in the future?

Newness is a category of experience that, however disturbing to those of a conservative temperament, is an inevitable part of the human condition.  At this moment in its history, the Church of England is faced by having to choose between an embrace of the new or the retreat into a stance of rejection.  In writing this I am reminded of a line from a Sidney Carter song ‘it is from the old I travel to the new.’  The so-called liberal Christians are suggesting that there is a theology of newness which presents us with a different approach to truth.  We may not get all the precise definitions that some require.  We find, rather, it must be approached in the way we encounter beauty.  The Christian faith is not, as I have indicated many times, reducible to a formula of words; it is found in a process which involves wonder, awe and a contemplation of a reality which cannot ever be fully expressed in words.  When we arrive at this point of knowing we will be, as the hymn puts it, ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’.