Comment: Joe Bennett on God and the meddling bishops

It doesn't matter to columnist Joe Bennett how the Anglican church goes about its business so long as it doesn't try to foist it on him.

OPINION

Ye gods, the meddling bishops. How they shoot their own feet. But first, let me lay out my stall.

I am a card-carrying atheist. To me, we are a species just as ants are a species. We evolved in the same way. The science says so. And just as there is no six-legged god in the sky with a segmented body and waving antennae, so there is no two-legged one either, with or without a beard and vaguely Roman toga.

Of course, I may be wrong, but please don’t bother to write and tell me. I’ll have plenty of time to work that out during my eternity of damnation in hell.

The Christian religion has brought many splendid things into being, from the great cathedrals to Gregorian chant to the King James Bible. One doesn’t have to believe in a creed to love them. But bishops will insist on fiddling with their best assets.

I went to a state school where the weekly assembly began with a hymn - most of the verses mercifully omitted - followed by a 400-year-old version of the Lord’s Prayer. ‘Our father,’ we muttered, ‘which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.’

I attached no meaning to the words. The best bit was 600 boys saying ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.’ It sounded like a nest of snakes.

That version of the Lord’s prayer has since been discarded as archaic, and the official Anglican version now begins, ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.’

But in the bid to produce something more contemporary and - oh dear - relevant, the bishops have lost more than they gained. For one thing, it remains archaic, and for another, the rhythm has been ruined. By running the first two statements into one they’ve lost the emphasis on the word ‘hallowed’ and with it an incantatory quality. The new version sounds flat.

And now the Archbishop of York has trained his sights on the first two words. ‘I know the word ‘father’ is problematic,’ he said at a recent conference, ‘for those whose experience of earthly fathers has been destructive and abusive, and for all of us who have laboured rather too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life.’

There are two things to observe here. One is the patronising implication that if I have an abusive father then I am incapable of imagining an unabusive one. The other is that the church is backing away from the patriarchy. Well, that’s a bit bloody rich and a bit bloody late. Even I know that God is Jesus’ father. Jesus said so. A lot.

Now, it doesn’t matter to me how the Anglican church goes about its business so long as it doesn’t try to foist it on me, but I can’t help pointing out that the archbishop is following a great tradition of messing around with its language.

In the early years of the 17th century, a committee of clerics and scholars was appointed to settle on a translation of the Bible into English. In defiance of everything we know about committees, they came up with something beautiful.

Their King James Bible contains hundreds if not thousands of expressions that have become a permanent part of the language: eat, drink and be merry; by the sweat of your brow; to move mountains; a land of milk and honey; baptism of fire; a thorn in the flesh; to suffer fools gladly and so on.

And here’s a famous passage from Ecclesiastes that Orwell quoted in one of his essays:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

You can only admire its clarity, simplicity and bleak rhythmic beauty. Yet the bishops felt it needed updating. Here’s the same passage from the Good News Bible of 1966.

I realised another thing, that in this world fast runners do not always win the races, and the brave do not always win the battles. The wise do not always earn a living, intelligent people do not always get rich, and capable people do not always rise to high positions. Bad luck happens to everyone.

From poetry to banality. Ye gods.