12 th April 2005
The Rt Rev James Jones, the Bishop of Liverpool
Good morning
“There's nothing new under the sun”, says the Bible. The controversy that erupted on this programme yesterday actually began in the second century AD! Norfolk County Council has been given a report about how religion should be taught in schools. Very important! It advises against telling children that the Bread and Wine that we eat in Holy Communion represent the Body and Blood of Christ. It's worried that children will think Christians are cannibals. The report's authors are well-meaning which is more than you can say for the opponents of Christianity in the 2 nd century. They were so alarmed at its rapid growth that they persecuted it – and were the first to accuse Christians of cannibalism.
The point about religious language like all language is that it needs to be learned – that's partly what schools are for! And in the process there'll inevitably be some misunderstandings!
As my own children grew up they did, as you might expect, hear an incomprehensible religious word or two. They once heard me talk about how when I was a child I had asked Jesus into my heart. This clearly made them look at me in a new light. A few days later they were jumping up and down on me like a trampoline when one of them suddenly stopped and, rather worried, said ‘I think we might have squashed Jesus'.
But dropping religious language from our vocabulary would be like dropping poetry. Similes and metaphors are the stuff of language. They are milk for the imagination and food for the soul. Years ago when I was an RE teacher, the Head of English laid into my department. He was well known in the school as an atheist. ‘Why do you no longer teach the Bible?' he protested. ‘How can I possibly teach the poetry of Milton, Blake and Hopkins if the students have no understanding of the fall, sin and redemption?' He had a point! The argument for teaching Christianity in our schools is not so much a confessional one as a cultural one.
One of the most famous quotations from the Bible is from St Paul 's letter to the Corinthians. ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly.' But in the original Paul doesn't use the word ‘darkly' at all! What he says is ‘For now we see through a glass in an enigma'. You see, saving those who speak Welsh, we don't have the language of Heaven. All that we have to talk about eternal truth is the language of the imagination - similes, metaphors, parables and poems.
If we empty the school curriculum of all the rich images of our culture, however difficult they may be to understand; then we'll risk reducing education to a series of training courses.
Learning skills for jobs is important, but education is more than that. As someone once said ‘Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.'