Erosion of faith

Church non-attendance is no longer the tip of the iceberg. The perceptible tip has now almost equalled the hidden mass under water, and at this rate it might even soon surpass it.

As I see it, the problem boils down to one basic thing: the gradual erosion of faith caused by the post-modern mentality of permissive society. The long embankment dexterously built by our ancestors to protect the simple faith of the faithful against this flooding has now gone to the four winds.

The authorities, who have a finger in the pie, have also themselves to blame for having let this thing deteriorate. But now, instead of crying over spilt milk, let's try to regain something of what has been lost.

The shift from 'practising' to 'nominal' Christian can have diverse reasons - from serious sceptical questions about faith to what is religiously or irreligiously fashionable at the time. The latter category is so exhaustive that the majority of people fall within it.

Today, media and vox pop set up the general verdict on popular belief and morality, which is gradually eroding the official teaching of the Church to establish a permissive society of its own. Thus, for these people, the Church has become archaic and superfluous. They don't feel the need for the Church any more.

And for God, too? That's a different question. Unfortunately, some even throw out the baby with the bathwater. But the majority keep the 'essential' (belief in God). However, they justify their church non-attendance by replacing it with their own makeshift 'spiritual' practising. This is a withered form of Christianity deprived of the nourishment conveyed to it by the soil. They are cut off from the tree like dried up and shrivelled flowers.

The more intellectual type of non-practising contemporaries may have doubts about our faith, which should be taken very seriously. Do these Christians have to abandon critical thought as they enter the church? By no means. Questions are usually asked by intelligent people who rightly expect an answer from those in authority. Our Creed must be interpreted into the post-modern world, and reduced to essentials for contemporary Christians to understand.

Our Creed begins with "I believe in God, Creator of Heaven and Earth". Can one still believe in the Creator God in the age of cosmology? The answer is yes. According to contemporary Biblical exegesis belief in God is compatible with a variety of models of the origin of the universe. The Bible does not seek to state any scientific or biological origins of the universe and man.

It can co-exist with the Big Bang theory as well as with Darwin's theory of evolution. It all depends on whether a literal or metaphorical interpretation is given to the very first biblical statements: "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth in six days" and "then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being". Michelangelo depicted all this in his unsurpassed frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

But doesn't the gigantic cosmic explosion of the Big Bang which occurred some 15 billion years ago contradict all this? No, the biblical accounts only give a testimony of faith as to the ultimate origin, which science can neither confirm nor refute. Natural science posits the Big Bang as the origin. But what was 'before' the Big Bang in terms of energy, matter, space and time? Here, the cosmological question, becomes the theological question, beyond the limits of pure reason (Kant). It is also a philosophical question, for why was there in the beginning anything at all and not nothing (Heidegger)? Is the meaning of the whole, the beginning of all beginnings, meaningless?

Criticism of religion is found not only in cosmology and biology, but also in philosophy (Voltaire, Feuerbach, Marx, Sartre, Nietzsche), in psychology (Freud), in godless humanism, and especially in the suffering of the innocent as the rock-bottom of atheism.

Still, people believe in a transcendent reality which cannot be verified by experiments. "A God who is there, is not God" (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) - for God cannot be simply an object.

To sum up, I only say: if we think that we do not need God, God, a fortiori, doesn't need us. Our human worshipping is, after all, a drop in the ocean compared with who God is - like carrying coals to Newcastle, or as we say in Maltese, lill-furnar isilfu hobza.