At the beginning of the week, it was my intention for this morning’s address to be very Advent orientated. I had actually already written most of it, all about getting ready, as Mary got ready for the coming of her son. A getting ready which began in the Hebrew Scriptures; a getting ready, not just for Jesus’ birth, but a getting ready in ourselves, as we prepare to live into the reality of that light coming into the world - of that Kingdom reality, present amongst us but so often undiscerned or ignored, inviting us to enter in, notice it, and inhabit it. And surely, there is an alternative reality out there in which that sermon is being preached now. However, on Thursday morning, I learned of the passing in the previous day of the theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer (he was 91 years old), and so as an act of respect, in memory to him, I knew this morning’s address had to be on him and his ideas which have impacted me so much. To my mind it’s a toss-up as to who has had more influence on me: Carl Jung, or Thomas Altizer. I think there’s probably a little bit of both of them in almost everything I say.

Okay, so I’ll make this about me for a moment, and try to explain why he’s had such an impact on me. Very briefly (I think most of you will know this), I didn’t grow up in a religious family at all. My dad is kind of an apathetic atheist. When I was 16, and had just started my A-levels, I was swept up into Charismatic Evangelical Christianity, had the whole conversion experience, and became a so-called ‘Bible believing Christian’. That was coupled with a strong sense that my life’s calling was to be a preacher, and I’ve never lost that sense. The power of good rhetoric can’t be underestimated in my opinion. It is my immense privilege to get into this pulpit every week, to weave a narrative, to tell a story, to make an argument, to hold up an idea for us to examine, to lead us in a journey from one place to another. There’s really nothing that beats it. So, it was a narrative of this kind which so compelled 16-year-old me. A narrative which I have subsequently found problematic and lacking. But at the time, it seized upon me, and seemed to offer so much. It offered purpose in purposelessness, it offered a concrete truth in a world in which it’s very difficult to talk about ‘the truth’, and it offered a very personal hope, not so much of a heavenly after-life to come (that was obviously part of it, but I was young enough that that wasn’t really a concern of mine), but rather it was more like a sense of destiny, that God had plans to use me, that I was part of something much bigger than myself. And, although now I’d need to give several provisos to this, I still do believe it, just in a very different sense.

So I went from that Evangelical community to Bible College, and from there to Cambridge, and in the course of my studies I slowly deconstructed that which I once held so certain. I slowly gave more and more ground to a more liberal, progressive and generous way of understanding my Christian faith. In the course of that deconstruction, I can remember a specific day when it struck me as starkly as my conversion did - we could call it my de-conversion experience - the day in which my ‘as held’ understanding of God suddenly fell out of the sky. And for lack of a better term, I began describing myself as a ‘Christian Atheist’. There were several writers at this time which I found particularly valuable: Lloyd Geering, Don Cupitt, Richard Holloway, and most of all Thomas J. J. Altizer. So, what is the problem I was trying to resolve through reading these theologians?