Sermon Archive
Real Insides
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd on 3 November 2002
1 Thessalonians 2.9-13; Matthew 23.1-12
A few months ago, our upstairs neighbour approached us about a former resident. From 1846 until 1861, long before it was split into our respective flats, the house was occupied by Robert Chambers and his extensive family. This year is the 200th anniversary of Chambers' birth and his admirers would like to commemorate him with a memorial plaque. Were we happy with the proposal? We were; and after various negotiations about its size and wording, the plaque is now being engraved and if all goes according to plan, it will be unveiled on the 23rd of this month.
Robert Chambers is probably best remembered nowadays as the founder, with his brother William, of the 19th century Edinburgh publishing house; and new editions of Chambers' Dictionaries, of course, are still widely used. In the firm's early years Robert himself also wrote much that it published in the highly popular Chambers' Journal, especially on antiquarian and historical subjects. His voluminous literary output included books that are still read, or at least dipped into, such as his Traditions of Edinburgh and Book of Days. But his main claim to a place in history perhaps, rests on a different kind of book, rarely read nowadays, but in its time a best seller, called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. In a fascinating study of Vestiges published two years ago, the Cambridge historian James Secord writes that it was more controversial than any other philosophical or scientific work of its time. In a hugely ambitious synthesis, it combined astronomy, geology, physiology, anthropology, and theology in a general theory of creation. It suggested that the planets had originated in a blazing Fire-mist, that life could be created in the laboratory, that humans had evolved from apes.
Vestiges was published in 1844. Two years earlier, exhausted by his literary labours for Chambers' Journal, Robert and his family had moved from Edinburgh to St Andrews, where he took up golf and researched and wrote his new book. His ability as a populariser ensured that it was highly readable and widely read. It was not until over a decade later, in 1859, that Charles Darwin was to publish his Origin of Species. During that decade Chambers' Vestiges was, as James Secord's study amply shows, a great Victorian Sensation. It 'was banned, it was damned, it was hailed as the gospel for a new age'. Predating Darwin, it was 'where our own public controversies about evolution began'.
As a scientist however, Robert Chambers was much more of an amateur than Charles Darwin, and Vestiges has not stood the test of time as well as Origin of Species. There was also another crucial difference between the two books. Darwin published his under his own name, but Chambers did so anonymously. In 19th century Edinburgh, to express such views publicly was risky. In 1865 his brother William was to be elected Lord Provost, and William's statue still stands opposite the National Museum of Scotland in Chambers Street. But earlier, in 1848, the mere whiff of a rumour that Robert was the author of Vestiges had forced him to withdraw his candidacy for the same office; and indeed even before the publication of Vestiges, he was socially suspect.
In the early 1830s, Robert and his wife Anne held a pew in the fashionable front row of the gallery in St Cuthbert's Parish Church. At that time, before St Cuthbert's was rebuilt, the gallery was much closer to, and on eye level with, the pulpit. One Sunday, shortly after Chambers' Journal began to be published, the senior minister of St Cuthbert's, 'waving a copy of the first issue' denounced its 'secular tone and neutrality on religion'. Robert and Anne left, never to darken St Cuthbert's doors again. Anne, later with their children, continued to attend church every Sunday, but now in what James Secord calls 'the less evangelical fold of the Scottish Episcopalians' - possibly St John's, but given the risk of running into members of St Cuthbert's on the way, it may have been one of several other Episcopal churches in the New Town at that time.
Robert, by contrast, as his wife put it, 'could not be accused of being "very guilty of church going"'. Robert Chambers in fact was not impressed by the 'evangelical enthusiasm and doctrinal controversies' of much 19th century Christianity. He hoped that his own work as a populariser of scientific and useful knowledge would contribute to the progress and general improvement of society, in which religion would still have a part to play, but a less dominant and more rational one. In that respect, although I don't think that he is on the BBC's list of 'great Britons', Robert Chambers certainly deserves to be remembered as one of the unsung makers of the modern world, who helped, bit by bit, to deconstruct the old religious orthodoxy and to construct in its place the secular orthodoxy of contemporary culture.
Is that contribution something that contemporary Christians, even those in 'the less evangelical fold of the Scottish Episcopalians' can approve? In certain respects it may be. Some of the deconstruction of religion which Chambers assisted, does now seem justified, not least from a Christian viewpoint. What Jesus says about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees in this morning's gospel, for example, could equally have been applied to a lot of conventional church life in 19th century Scotland, no doubt as much here in St John's as across the churchyard in St Cuthbert's. Today too, it is difficult to defend the way that many 19th century churchmen opposed the kind of scientific ideas that Chambers and Darwin were trying to get across. Genesis is not a scientific account, and evolutionary theory is not a religion, and as long as that is kept in mind, they are not incompatible. But that is not always kept in mind, and here perhaps there is a problem that Robert Chambers may not have anticipated, and one that might have worried him if he had.
One of the reasons why Vestiges was published anonymously can be summed up in what Chambers once heard someone say about it: the book 'was too horrible to have been written by a decent family man'. But Robert Chambers was just that, and above all he wanted to protect his own family's privacy from that kind of attack. He believed that a person's real self, or their 'real insides' as he put it, could only be known by intimate acquaintance with them over a long time. External information about them, derived from gossip or the press, distorted the truth and prevented real understanding. Chambers understandably did not want that kind of thing to happen to him or his much-loved wife and family.
What Chambers may not have anticipated however, was that what his work contributed to could eventually threaten what he wished to preserve. Having deconstructed religion, the secular orthodoxy of the 20th century had nothing except science and individual experience on which to rely for human self-understanding; and since individual experience varies so much from person to person, the only firm ground now appeared to be science. But science is firm knowledge precisely because it is impersonal. The problem with secular orthodoxy, in other words, is that the only way it allows us to understand ourselves and other people is through the kind of external information that, as Chambers saw, often distorts the truth and prevents the real understanding we can gain only from intimate acquaintance with one another over time. Secular orthodoxy, relying on external information from science and other sources of observation, thus eventually made it very much easier for everyone to equate the truth about other people with second-hand information about them fed by the media, or more locally, by gossip. Such superficial opinions about people known only through the media or gossip, are held with astonishing confidence by many of us, especially when it is convenient to our political or personal prejudices.
Is there any remedy for this? Now that secular orthodoxy has become established, like every other orthodoxy its cracks are beginning to show, and however much we value the benefits of science and technology, our society is beginning to realise that they are not enough to live by. Truth is learned not just from the evidence of experiment, but also by personal experience, testing the testimony of other individuals, of communities, and of our own minds and hearts. To understand ourselves and the world aright, and to make wise choices both in our personal lives and about the use of science and technology, we need repeatedly to activate our imagination into reminding us that other people, every bit as much as we ourselves, have 'real insides'.
But that is not all. The horizon of human knowledge is not just a limit to be observed, but also where a question is posed that one way or another we are bound to answer. At that horizon, again by activating our imagination as we need to do with one another, we may come into the presence of a deeper truth - the experienced truth that the universe itself has a 'real inside' - one to whom 'all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid'. This experienced truth assures us that faith is not in vain. But it also assures us that humanity - our humanity, the humanity of others, and especially the humanity of those who have lived in pain or poverty or died in disgrace or despair - that all this humanity essentially matters, and is not ultimately lost in empty space. This assurance, of course, is not a dead certainty. It is, rather, a living one, a fighting certainty which we can prove only as we put it into practice. We do that, as we can, when we live and pray as people who are responsible for one another, and when we live and pray as individuals whose real selves are finally known only to the patient, all-sustaining heart of everything, Love Incarnate.
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