Hold or cut the golden thread?

There's a ‘mysteriously beautiful’ vision threaded through our world, writes Stephen Cottrell. In an extract from his Dear England book, the Archbishop of York considers the Beatitudes.

Stephen Cottrell

Stephen Cottrell is Primate of England and Archbishop of York. He has authored 20 books.

A CGI render of a grid of golden lines receding into the perspective

The golden thread.

Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

The heart of Jesus’ teaching is found in the longest teaching passage in the Gospels, it is known as the Sermon on the Mount.

It begins with a mysteriously beautiful passage known as the Beatitudes.

Here Jesus sets out a series of maxims that at first sight seem to be his equivalent of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, the Old Testament prophet who received the latter, when Jesus receives the Beatitudes he has gone up a mountain.

And like Moses he has a series of short, pithy things to say that will then need a lifetime to work out.

However, the Beatitudes are not a moral code. They are not things you can either do or not do. They are attitudes to which we can aspire. Rather than describing the moral life, a code by which we can justly live alongside each other in society, they describe what it looks like to 'go the second mile’. They describe what perfect love in action looks like.

Here they are:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I don't propose to spend ages unpacking these. But alongside the Ten Commandments themselves, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, the Beatitudes have become one of the central documents of the Church.

Living by them is the work of a lifetime.

They are the centre of Jesus' teaching. Their meaning, however, isn't always self-evident. Like his stories, they need inhabiting.

They are very challenging. It isn't easy to be merciful. It isn't easy to make peace. Especially if the likely outcome is the persecution we usually make efforts to avoid. Not that there is anything good about persecution. As we know, mockery and ridicule hurt. How much more hurtful is it to be hunted down because of your witness to peace? Nevertheless, it is witnesses to peace that Jesus is recruiting here. His own life, and everything that he teaches, led this way: to the peace that is beyond the world's understanding and is about a wholeness and totality of giving and receiving love.

Jesus is inviting us to live with a different set of attitudes. And he does not baulk from acknowledging that these attitudes will bring us into conflict with the carefully protected interests of those who secure power and influence for themselves at the expense of peace. They exchange it for what is little more than a truce. At best, an absence of war, what we live in our jealously guarded siloes and forcibly protect our borders, repelling intruders and stamping on those who even dream differently.

In our own society, thankfully, we enjoy freedoms of speech and action. This means that we rarely meet with much opposition beyond people's unreflective apathy or polished disdain. But these freedoms we enjoy should not be taken for granted. They have been hard won. They could easily be lost. Especially if we fail to see where they have come from; precisely this realisation of the dignity and worth of every person and our responsibilities to each other that arose through Christ.

Unfortunately, these things that underpin what is best in our society are not self-evidently the best. We've got so used to them that we easily imagine they are. But actually, we don't observe them in the world around us. Nature, for instance, is not democratic. Nor particularly caring. The weakest usually die first. The fittest survive. Nor is it much different in human communities. Our history - always written by those who win - is one bloody story of conquest after another.

Empires rise and fall, and there is very little to suggest that there might be another kingdom where a different set of values prevails, and where the king turns out to be the servant of all. But that is precisely the Christian narrative. It is a golden thread running through human history. In every age it can either be held on to, or cut away; left to our own devices, especially when our backs are to the wall, we find that the human compass is usually set towards self-preservation. Our empires and systems are usually designed to keep others out. Or at least in their place, so that they can serve us. In this so-called ‘real world’, shepherds do not go in search of one lost sheep, as Jesus suggested God does, in one of his parables. That would be uneconomic. Like the rest of us, they play a percentages game, and for the sake of the ninety-nine, we accept the loss of the one. The strongest and the wiliest prevail. That's just how it is, we say. If we can help the weak, we will. But if we can't, or if it affects us badly, we won't and we don't.

This is why the world needs a set of values - and a story - that will save us from ourselves, and our worst instincts. This is why we need a set of values that are rooted in a tradition whose stories and whose very heart are, gloriously, the life and teaching of a person who is himself the revelation of God's love and purposes for the world he made and loves - who even laid down his life to search out those who are lost: the very image of the invisible God. More than that: someone who loves us and knows what it is like to be us, who has experienced from the inside just what it is like to inhabit a divided and compromised world.

Therefore, the Beatitudes are a set of values and attitudes by which we can inhabit the world differently and through which we can begin to see what matters in the world and what must be done.

Dear England: Finding Hope, Taking Heart and Changing the World is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Article

Belief

Creed

11 April 2025

4 min read

Why news of the ‘Quiet Revival’ needs taking with a pinch of salt

When Christianity becomes cool, it has a tendency to lose its soul.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An ancient salt shaker sits next to a pile of crushed rock salt.

Out of the salt shaker.

Jonathan Tame on Unsplash.

Mark Twain, that purveyor of slanted wisdom, was wary of data. "Figures often beguile me," he wrote, "particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"

Now whether Disraeli ever said this is a moot point. The quotation has been attributed to figures as various as Walther Bagehot, Arthur Balfour and the Duke of Wellington. Either way it has gone down in history as expressing a certain strand of suspicion when it comes to statistical analysis of the future.

This phrase came to mind this past week when reading The Quiet Revival, a study conducted by the Bible Society that suggests that the long story of church decline in England and Wales is over. It claims that church attendance has risen by 50 per cent over the last six years and particularly young adult men are increasingly turning to the Church, especially to the Roman Catholic and Pentecostal versions of it.

The report been hailed and celebrated by Christian commentators, perhaps in a spirit of relief, thankful for some good news against the background of months of dreary and gloomy news of resigning Archbishops, looming splits in the church over sexuality and the ongoing seemingly inevitable process of decline.

Now I don't for a moment mean to doubt the results of the survey. Or to get all Scrooge-like at the findings. For those of us who have been part of the church for years it is indeed welcome news and a cause for some cautious optimism. It always lifts the spirits a little to feel that others see what you see, and you're not whistling in the dark when it comes to continuing to believe. ‘Revival’ is perhaps too ambitious a word to use right now. It would need a lot more hard evidence from bigger surveys and more observable results to deserve such a designation. But there do seem to be straws blowing in the wind, perhaps the first signs of a refreshing breeze which might yet sweep away some of the shadows of sceptical unbelief.

The appeal of Christian faith is precisely the fact that it's not based on how many people believe it.

Yet forgive me if I take all this with a pinch of salt. The popularity of Christianity has always waxed and waned throughout the last two thousand years. There are times when it has been the flavour of the month - or the century - such as when it started to become the official religion of the Roman Empire 300 years or so after the time of Jesus. Yet popularity brings its dangers. When Christianity becomes cool, it has a tendency to lose its soul, its radical nature diluted by the flocks of people drawn to the cross as a kind of fashion accessory. At other times it has dwindled to a few hardy souls braving it out, like the eleven fearful disciples huddling together in Jerusalem, looking for an escape route after the execution of Jesus, or the tough, rugged Christians who carried on praying during years of persecution, often paying for their faith with their lives.

Christianity’s claims to truth are not dependent on a referendum. For us Christians, our faith remains true whether or not people believe it. The fact that more people may be going to church now than a few years ago doesn't make the Christian faith any more or less true. I've never taken the predictions of the church's demise too seriously. Which is why I'm not one for putting out the bunting when the predictions go the other way.

This why it seems to me that, like Mark Twain, believers in Jesus ought also to be a little sceptical of statistics. Numerical projections and probability theory have their uses in trying to spot social trends, but they don't have much bearing on questions of truth. After all, statistical analysis of what tends to happen to dead people would never have predicted the Resurrection.

The appeal of Christian faith is precisely the fact that it's not based on how many people believe it. It centres on an event where the eternal became temporal, where God entered into human history in the shape of a Galilean rabbi. It therefore transcends time and space, opinion polls and surveys. It gives a confidence rooted not in the swinging mood of public opinion, up one minute and down the next, but instead something lasting, permanent and reliable.

So be glad, if you want, at the prospect of a coming renewed wave of faith. But don’t be fooled into thinking this proves anything. As Jesus once said: “Do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

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