Bishop of London presents the Seventh Annual Hobart Lecture

Focusing on the theme, The Return of the Hidden God: Renewing our Partnership in the Gospel, Bishop Richard Chartres of London initiated the Seventh Annual Hobart Lecture with the similarities between his home and here.

“ We are both set in a cosmopolitan context, the home of international organizations, a hub of communications and centre of financial services in the global economy of our wired up world,” he noted. “With a renewed sense of the challenge and opportunity which confronts us both, we are already in so many ways deepening our friendship and I want to take this opportunity to reflect on our common task as a contribution to renewing our partnership in the gospel.”
Addressing nearly 150 people on September 20, Bishop Chartres reflected on the life of Bishop John Henry Hobart, who “found a somewhat introverted church composed of old colonial families and left it a church of the growing American people. He found 28 clergy in the Diocese in 1811 but when he died there were 127. He revived confidence in the apostolic character of the church.”

Pointing out that Bishop Hobart “is an inspiring patron of this series,” he remarked, “he extended the church on the basis of the faith uniquely revealed in Holy Scriptures but scripture studied in company with the saints of the primitive church rather than interpreted simply by reference to our own provincial point in space and time. He was a man of passion but committed to sound learning and the best theological education of his time.”

Chartres took Hobart’s record and juxtaposed it with the society facing both dioceses today.

“ In contemporary North Western Europe perhaps more than in the U.S. as a whole, God for the moment is largely hidden from our view. Continental Europeans to a greater extent than we island folk sometimes actually worry that God has too much prominence in American public life.”

He lamented, “The absence of God is itself very eloquent and a human society living without any rooting in God and attempting instead to possess fullness of life by accumulation soon exhibits symptoms of distress.”

He peppered his presentation with a touch of humor. For example, “There is an astonishing new credulity supporting the contention of C.S.Lewis that when people cease to believe in Christianity, they do not come to believe in nothing rather they will believe anything. The Economist had a story the other day about a tabloid newspaper and its astrology column. The official astrologer did not turn up one morning so a rather cynical hack was drafted in to compose some suitable predictions. To relieve the boredom he wrote under Cancer – ‘All the ills of yesteryear are as nothing to what will befall you today’. It was just a bit of fun but the switchboard was jammed with panicking readers and he had to be sacked.”

Chartres spoke on the important link between spirituality and ecology. “In the UK the church has just launched a campaign to shrink its own ecological footprint as part of raising consciousness about the autism which we seem to exhibit towards creation. We have been heartened recently by statements from leading American Evangelicals affirming the link between Christian faith and care for creation.”

He did not shy away from the terrorist tragedies that both cities have endured. “We have both felt the unrighteous wrath of the terrorists. In the dangerous circumstances we both face mere appeals for tolerance on the basis of our common humanity are not enough and do not generate the energy needed for transformation.”

He provided a suggestion: “Part of our work as a church must be engagement with other people of faith whose attitudes and values may be alien to us, speaking from faith to faith. I know that the Cathedral here has a distinguished record in this work.”

After discussing his recent work in the field of inter-religious understanding, he noted, “We are not looking for religious consensus or for polemical debate. Instead against the horizon of the challenges which face us all, our responsibility for the planet, our relations with the stranger in our midst, our search for economic justice in the world, participants are invited to go to their own scriptures, Torah, Quran, Bible to identify the resources for engaging with these great themes. There is no fourth position when these believers, Jews, Muslims, Christians, who are in their different ways children of Abraham, meet. There is no covert assumption of the kind which underlies some so called interfaith work that the religious traditions are simply more or less adequate local editions of universal spiritual truths. I can only say from experience that ‘scriptural reasoning’ is a method which can permit hard things to be said in conversations which often result in participants deepening their sense of the identity and uniqueness of their own tradition and yet because we speak in company with others and thus accountably the result is at the same time deeper respect for other traditions.”
Pointing out that “the most spectacular Christian growth has been in black churches,” Chartres challenged the assembly, “I am convinced that God is calling us, in the many ways I have described, out of a period of introversion to emulate the outward looking urgency of John Henry Hobart.”

He concluded, “If we approach Christ in this spirit then the God whose human face he is may disclose himself as the God of infinite promise, as the God whose energy is encountered in the darkness of ‘what is’, as the true and living God who is the truth but not a self-serving truth rather He is the God and truth who serves and loves for others, even for those who are his enemies. I believe that this is certain but beyond all words that ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have beheld his glory as of the only begotten from the Father full of grace and truth’.”.

Bishop Chartres complete Hobart address is available on the diocesan web site, www.dioceseny.org