Where Afric’s sunny fountains?

In the post-Enlightenment era, as Europe became (seemingly) invincible and (seem ingly) great on the back of scientific discovery and method, the God of most church practice became increasingly removed from the grot and squalor of everyday experience.

The God of art became a massive human form, remote and with accentuated muscularity. The God of theology became a champion of national law, (“law ‘n’ order,” in fact), a conservative God who kept the poor in their place and the rich in theirs. Much though we love our national anthem I suggest that it was this God who was expected to defend New Zealand in Thomas Bracken’s words to our anthem, and to save the monarch in Britain’s equivalent. (Australia avoided a god in its anthem, rejoicing in a larrikin spirit of youth and freedom instead).

 

God became an aesthetic God, beautiful and remote and His (definitely His, with a Capital H) Kingdom became a glorious Romantic idyll. Much of our hymnody and choral music reflects this too, with the now thankfully forgotten “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” perhaps the most lamentable example:

 

From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand;
Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand:
From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.

If I am harsh on this era in writing and preaching  it is because that god of beautiful tropical idylls was brutally silenced by two world wars. The God of "dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori" died, as Wilfred Owen told us bitterly, in the first gas attack of World War One, and has stayed dead.

Theologians, artists, hymn-writers and others are slowly rumouring a different God. Black theologians like James Cone in the USA have been trying to tell us for years that the real God of Resurrection was found in the painfilled experience of their oppressed slave-ancestors, and hymned in the negro-spirituals far more effectively than in our great Victorian  Eurocentric hymns (however beautiful they might be) and canticles and anthems.

 

So if your dean bleats on and on from his soapbox (as he has been accused of doing) about a crucified God who is accessible to and biased towards the poor and the simple and the unsophisticated, it is because that bleat is a gospel imperative.  That is why we journey through Lent, that is why we allow vulnerable children to lead (as much as we are allowed) our worship, that is why we look to simplicity, rather than glorious aesthetic majesty on our journey: “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?"