Maximilian Kolbe makes awkward patron saint for the Kolbe Center

 

“Once the Kolbe Center embraces the idea that God Himself—through His Bible and His Church—teaches that He created the universe fully formed in six, 24 hour days, 6000 years ago, with the Earth at the center of that universe, it becomes for them

a matter of Catholic orthodoxy to defend these positions. They insist that Catholics must be convinced that they are falling into a Modernist trap if they abandon

these positions”.

 Fr. Paul Robinson

 

St. Maximilian Kolbe’s Disagreement with the Kolbe Center

 

St. Maximilian Kolbe’s Disagreement with

the Kolbe Center

 

August 29, 2018|Book review, Religion article

  

Introduction

 

The Kolbe Center designates itself as “a Catholic apostolate dedicated to proclaiming the truth about the origins of man & the universe”. That ‘truth’ amounts to a purportedly Catholic version of what is really just modern Protestant creationism, the idea—more properly referred to as ‘biblicism’—that God intended for the Bible to teach science through a strictly literal interpretation of the Biblical text. This idea leads the Kolbe Center to conclude that the Bible teaches geocentrism, a 6000 year age of the universe, and a Deluge that covered the entire Earth, instead of a limited part of it.

 

Since they insist that this is what the Bible teaches, and the Bible is inerrant (as we all agree), they also conclude that this is what the Church teaches.

This is where they go astray.

 

Since Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1893), Catholic exegetes have abandoned the idea that the Bible is meant to teach science, adding this principle to the age old Catholic principle that the Bible must be reconciled with science, at least with settled science. Pope Leo explicitly states that:

 

• Sacred Scripture speaks in a popular language that describes physical things as they appear to the senses, and so does not describe them with scientific exactitude.
• The Fathers of the Church were mistaken in some of their opinions about questions of science.
• Catholics are only obliged to follow the opinion of the Fathers when they were unanimous on questions of faith and morals, where they did not err, and not on questions of science, where they sometimes erred.

 

Notwithstanding the authority of this encyclical and succeeding pre-Vatican II encyclicals on Scripture; notwithstanding the fact that biblicism has never been a position of the Catholic Church, but rather has its origins in Protestantism; notwithstanding the clear evidence that pre-Vatican II Catholic exegetes, including those fully orthodox, did not countenance the creationist position in their Scripture manuals and scholarly Biblical journals—despite all this, the Kolbe Center claims that creationist biblicism is the ‘traditional Catholic doctrine of creation’.

 

Defending Orthodoxy

 

Once the Kolbe Center embraces the idea that God Himself—through His Bible and His Church—teaches that He created the universe fully formed in six, 24 hour days, 6000 years ago, with the Earth at the center of that universe, it becomes for them a matter of Catholic orthodoxy to defend these positions. They insist that Catholics must be convinced that they are falling into a Modernist trap if they abandon these positions.

 

This is why the Kolbe Center warns, in an article on their website:

 

The argument is sometimes made that abusing the literal meaning of Scripture has little effect on moral perspectives. Whether creation or evolution is true, we are told, is a question to be resolved by science, as it marches on, every day, in steady progress toward improving the general welfare and standard of living. This modernist attitude is refuted by the progressive and degenerative moral effect produced by rejection of, first, geocentrism in the 17th century, then special creation in the 19th century, and now the very existence of human life in the womb in the 20th. The theistic evolutionists and Scriptural revisionists have twisted the literal meaning of Genesis to accept both biotic and cosmic evolution.

 

In this way, the acceptance of geocentrism and young Earth creation is placed on the same level as the acceptance of life beginning at the moment of conception.

 

Moreover, according to the Kolbe Center, one capitulates to a plot of atheists when one rejects geocentrism and young Earth creation:

 

Atheists understand that in order to replace the Bible-based Christian worldview and system of morality, they need to discredit the Church and the Bible. They do this by questioning the Genesis account of Creation and the Fall, and the global Flood. One can even argue that the effort to replace geocentrism with heliocentrism was more an attack on the Church and the Bible than it was a scientific endeavor.

 

Additionally, the Kolbe Center strongly promotes the book The Doctrines of Genesis 1-11 by Fr. Victor Warkluwiz. It includes as doctrines of Genesis the following:

 

•  God created each thing in the world immediately.
•  God created the world in six natural days.
•  God created the world several thousand years ago.
•  God destroyed the world that was with a worldwide flood.

 

In this book, Fr. Warkluwiz also espouses geocentrism as the “clear” teaching of the Bible.

The Realist Guide Review

 

The Church holds that the questions of the age and development of the universe are not settled by the Bible, thus leaving these questions to the investigations of science and leaving Catholics free to hold their own opinions on those questions. In my own book, I demonstrate that the Church binds her members to believe that God created the universe, that He created our first parents directly, and that all human beings descend from Adam and Eve.

 

It is my own opinion, expressed in The Realist Guide to Religion and Science, that there is strong scientific evidence for the Big Bang Theory and so for an ancient universe, while there is strong scientific evidence against Darwinian evolution, whether it be the development of life from non-life by purely natural processes, or whether it be the development of more complex species from less complex species by purely natural processes, what is known as macroevolution.

 

In the terminology, this makes me a ‘progressive creationist’, one who holds that there was a chemical and galactic development of the universe over billions of years by means of the fine tuning that God built into the universe, but that God Himself directly intervened, on multiple occasions, to create biological life.

 

Because I hold this position, I came under fire in the review of my book that appeared on the Kolbe Center website in May. The reviewer was naturally pleased at my strong criticism of Darwinian evolution, but was not surprisingly displeased at other aspects of the book and attacked my orthodoxy, as follows:

 

“To deny the global Flood is essentially to call Our Lord Jesus Christ a liar or mistaken about a fact of history.”

“The Bible explicitly says three times that the earth does not move (Psalms 92:1, 95:10, and 103:5 DRB).  It also states three times that the world was created in six days (Gen. 1, Exodus 20:11 and 31:17) and the Genesis genealogies are given in exact years.”
“Fr. Robinson gives far too much credit to fallible human hypotheses in natural science in thinking that geocentrism, a young earth, and a global Flood have been disproven, contrary to the Bible.”

 

By making these statements, the reviewer is not only calling into question my own orthodoxy as a Catholic priest, but also that of many perfectly orthodox and much more illustrious figures of our Catholic past. For the fact is that the standard pre-Vatican II and post-Providentissimus Deus position of Catholics was to consider themselves completely free on these questions. For instance, one example of a pre-Vatican II progressive creationist can be provided in the figure of St. Maximilian Kolbe.

St. Maximilian & cosmic evolution

 

The Kolbe Center provides seven reasons for choosing St. Maximilian Kolbe as its patron saint, one of them being that he “did not subscribe to theistic evolutionism or to long ages”. It is important to note that they count ‘progressive creationism’ as a form of ‘theistic evolutionism’, as may be seen in the review of The Realist Guide:

 

Fr. Robinson takes the position of progressive creation, which is a form of theistic evolution.

 

To discover St. Maximilian’s views on subjects of natural science, one may profitably consult the two volume The Writings of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, released in English in 2016. While I did not find anything in these volumes that refers to his position on the extent of the Flood, his position on the other matters are made quite clear.

 

The helpful index at the conclusion of the second volume has four entries for the topic “Evolutionism/Evolution”, of which n.1186 perhaps contains St. Maximilian’s clearest statement on that topic:

 

I am not able to believe that man is a perfected ape. We are dealing here with the problem of evolutionism. One hundred and twenty years ago, there was no theory more diffused among the people than evolution. A whole mountain of critical essays has been published in this regard, but the more books are written, the more the problem persists. This theory not only does not accord with the findings of contemporary experimental sciences, which are in continuous development, but they even contradict them, as has been accurately ascertained.

 

What is notable about this passage is not just that St. Maximilian rejects Darwinian evolution, as I do, on the basis of scientific evidence, but also that he does not have recourse to Scripture or theology in refuting it, knowing that it is not a question for theology. In n.1124, he even states that, if evolution were true, it would still have to come from God:

 

Even if we amuse ourselves by being evolutionists and proclaim that all of this has developed from a certain primitive material, the same question would still apply. Who gave life to this matter? And who, with such wisdom, has endowed it with movement, so that after so many years, during which several changes have taken place, could implement the intended purpose? Well, this mind, which is guided by such intelligence, we call God.

 

On the questions of heliocentrism and the age of the universe, there is a text by St. Maximilian, n.1201, that could not make his position clearer: he accepted the standard scientific position on these questions, namely, that

 

1. The earth revolves around the sun.
2. The solar system itself is moving.
3. The earth and the moon developed from nebular matter over very long periods of time.

 

Here, then, is his position on heliocentrism and the movement of the solar system:

 

My chair, rotating together with the earth, moves at a speed of 300 m a second, while our earth revolves around the sun at 30 km/s. The earth, together with the sun, is moving toward the constellation of Hercules.

 

He likewise holds that the stars are millions of years old:

 

To reach the furthest star [in the Milky Way], 140 million years would be necessary. It is therefore easy to understand that the position of the stars, which we now see with our eyes, is not the actual one, but the position they had 140 million years ago.

 

Finally, Fr. Maximilian does not believe that the earth, moon, and sun were created directly by God, but rather that they formed over long periods of time from a nebula:

 

[Science] teaches that the moon was detached from the earth after the latter came into existence. The earth itself was detached from the sun, while the sun originated from a nebula. Besides, it seems probable that an enormous number of stars, together with the Milky Way, have been detached from a nebula. This is what science teaches. It could be observed that the history and evolution of the earth take place just as they used to happen in the past, in very remote eras, in some nebula.

 

St. Maximilian did not find these positions to be injurious to the faith; on the contrary, he expressed them in an issue of his Japanese version of The Knight of the Immaculata and concluded them with an argument for the existence of God. If we couple his stance on cosmic evolution with his rejection of Darwinian evolution, we have the position of progressive creationism.

Conclusion

 

I did not realize, when I wrote my book, that my own position was so close to that of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Though I am obviously gratified to find that such is the case, it is nevertheless disconcerting to find that St. Maximilian Kolbe should fall under the same condemnations under which I fell by the Kolbe Center of which he is the patron. If his Knight of the Immaculata article from above were submitted anonymously to the Kolbe Center, it would certainly receive a negative review.

 

….

The fact is that St. Maximilian did not agree with the central tenets of the Biblicist creationism on which the Kolbe Center is founded. The Kolbe Center professes to have chosen him as its patron, because “he was an expert in theology, philosophy, and natural science”, but it does not follow him in questions of natural science nor those of exegetical science.

 

In light of this fact, it would seem that the Kolbe Center should either choose a different patron for its endeavors or, please God, adopt the position of its patron.

 

Damien F. Mackey’s comment:

 

The Australian Marian Academy of the Immaculate Conception (AMAIC), to which I belong, takes a lot of its inspiration from St. Maximilian Kolbe, including his desire for “a Marian Academy”. A wheelchair-bound Polish Cardinal at the Vatican, Andrzej Maria Deskur (d. 2011) – a very good friend of Polish pope-Saint John Paul II – insisted that we add to our name, Australian Marian Academy, the phrase “of the Immaculate Conception”. That would have pleased Maximillian Kolbe.  

 

I knew that Saint Maximilian was interested in science, and that he had hoped to write a significant book on science. That is all that I knew until yesterday (8^th November, 2026). In common with him is our rejection of evolution. However, the rest surprised me, an old earth; expanding universe; origin of the earth with the Big Bang.

 

But that does not matter, because it is primarily from the saint’s Mariology - not his science - that the AMAIC would derive its connections with him.

 

 

Caesarea at the Gates of Hades

 

 

“He did not announce the church in the Court of the Gentiles at the temple.

He did not announce it in a quiet field outside Jerusalem. He announced it

in front of the cliff of the dead gods, with the marble temple of Caesar above it,

the cave of the underworld behind it, and a row of empty idol niches

as the backdrop. The location was the sermon”.

 The Berean Heart

 

Why Did Jesus Choose Caesarea Philippi? The ‘Gates of Hades’ Saying Decoded – The Berean Heart: Hank's Bible Study Resources

 

Why Did Jesus Choose Caesarea Philippi?

The ‘Gates of Hades’ Saying Decoded

 

Most of us have read Matthew 16:18 a hundred times. The gates of Hades will not prevail against the church. We hear it as a vague promise of victory. We picture Jesus saying it somewhere in Galilee, in a synagogue maybe, on a hillside maybe, on a road definitely.

 

He said it in front of a cliff the locals called the gate of hell.

The location matters. The location was the sermon.

 

Where Jesus took them

 

Mark and Matthew both mark the location precisely. Caesarea Philippi. The far northern edge of the land Israel had ever called its own. Twenty-five miles north of the Sea of Galilee, at the foot of Mount Hermon, in territory that had been pagan for centuries.

 

The Jews around Jesus did not go there. There was nothing for them there. The place was almost entirely Gentile, mostly Greek-speaking, dominated by foreign cults and a recent Roman temple. It was the last place in the region a Jewish rabbi would take his students for a teaching field trip.

 

Jesus took them there on purpose.

 

The cliff of the dead gods

 

The place had a long religious history before he arrived. In the time of the Old Testament it had been called Baal-Hermon and Baal-Gad, names that tell you what was being worshiped on the slopes. By the time of Jesus it was named for the Greek god Pan, and the locals called it Paneas, which is preserved in the modern Arabic name Banias.

 

A massive cliff face rose at the back of the city. Carved into that cliff was a row of niches that had once held statues of Pan and other Greek gods. You can still see those niches today. The cliff was called the Rock of the Gods.

 

At the base of the cliff was a cave. The locals believed the cave was a literal gate to the underworld. Spring water poured out of the cave, which they believed came up from the realm of the dead. The Greeks and Romans performed rituals there meant to summon and to please the gods of the depths.

 

The ancient writer Eusebius records that goats were thrown into the cave as offerings and never reappeared, which the locals took as evidence that the cave reached all the way down. The whole place dripped with what was called underworld access.

 

And on top of all that, Herod the Great’s son Philip had recently built a gleaming white marble temple to Caesar Augustus on the platform above the cliff. The imperial cult planted in the very rock the locals called the mouth of hell. Pagan idolatry and Roman imperialism stacked on top of one another at the worst religious address in the region.

 

The question and the confession

 

Jesus started with the easy question. Who do men say that I am. The disciples gave him the polite answers. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. One of the prophets. Then he sharpened the question. But who do you say that I am.

 

Peter answered. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16, NKJV). Notice the phrasing. The Son of the living God. Spoken in front of a row of dead gods carved into a cliff. Peter is not just confessing the deity of Jesus. He is contrasting Jesus with everything that cliff face stood for. The God in front of us is alive. The gods in the niches behind you are not.

 

The rock and the gates

 

Then Jesus answered. “On this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18, NKJV).

 

The Greek for rock is petra (G4073), a feminine noun meaning a massive ledge of stone, a cliff, bedrock. Not a stepping stone. Not a pebble. The kind of rock you build a wall on top of. He may well have gestured at the cliff while he said it. On this rock. He was claiming the rock everyone thought belonged to death and to Caesar for his church.

 

The Greek for church is ekklēsia (G1577), the called-out assembly, used in the Greek Old Testament for the congregation of Israel gathered before the Lord. This is the first time the word appears in the Gospels. The church gets its name in a sermon delivered at the gate of hell.

 

And the famous line is doing something we miss in the English. Gates do not advance. Gates do not attack. Gates hold a position. They defend. To say that the gates of Hades will not prevail is to say that the gates will fail. The church will be the one advancing, and the gates of hell will be the ones falling. He is not promising the church will survive the onslaught. He is promising the church will lead the onslaught and the gates will not hold.

The Greek word for prevail is katischuō (G2729), to overpower, to be strong enough to hold off. Hell does not have the strength to hold off the church his Father is going to build. The picture is hell on its heels.

 

Why he picked the worst spot

 

He did not announce the church in the Court of the Gentiles at the temple. He did not announce it in a quiet field outside Jerusalem. He announced it in front of the cliff of the dead gods, with the marble temple of Caesar above it, the cave of the underworld behind it, and a row of empty idol niches as the backdrop. The location was the sermon.

 

There is something deeply pastoral about that choice. Look at where you have lived your worst spiritual experience and assume Jesus would never set foot there. The place of your secret shame. The room where you betrayed somebody. The car where you signed the lie. The bar where the addiction had its grip on you. We expect Jesus to call us back to the safe places. He calls us out to the cliff faces. He builds on the ground the enemy thought belonged to him.

 

If he is willing to plant his church at the gate of hell, he is willing to plant his work in the address you would never bring him to. He picks the worst spot on purpose. That is not bad news for the worst spot on your map. That is the gospel.

 

The rock will not hold. The gates will fall. And he will build what he said he would build, on the ground you thought was already lost.

 

 

 

Rethinking Christianity by Alister McGrath

 

 

In public debates with Dawkins, he dismissed the claims of the “New Atheists”

that Christianity was a fraud. Dawkins and his sort, McGrath now says,

“were aggressively asserting atheist beliefs, but posing as if they were

telling incontestable truths”.

  

Theologian Alister McGrath: Christianity is back because it answers the big questions

The Telegraph

 

Theologian Alister McGrath:

Christianity is back because it answers

the big questions

  

Story by Peter Stanford

03 Nov ….

 

Alister McGrath is releasing a new book, Rethinking Christianity:

A Thoughtful Guide to a Life-Changing Faith - Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph

 

Last year, a survey for the Bible Society, carried out by YouGov, made headlines. The number of Gen Z Britons attending church services, it declared, had soared by 16 per cent between 2018 and 2024. The news led to discussions in Parliament, and Church conferences trumpeting this “quiet revival”.

 

What made the claims so believable was a parallel narrative, more anecdotal but also more widespread, about young people embracing religion. You heard it everywhere, in opinion pieces, features and online chatter. It was the subject of entire books, such as Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion by the award-winning young writer Lamorna Ash.

 

Yet, even as interest in Christianity became more vocal, the statistics came into question. The Bible Society report was contested, and eventually withdrawn; the British Social Attitudes Survey then reported, over exactly the same period, a 9 per cent fall in 18 to 34-year-olds who described themselves as “religious”. Given the level of claim and counter-claim, this has become ground where angels fear to tread.

 

Alister McGrath is well aware. A former professor of divinity, now emeritus professor in science and religion at the University of Oxford … one of Britain’s best known and most respected Christian intellectuals.

 

This mild-mannered 73-year-old chooses his words with great care in his north Oxford flat as we try to sort out what is and isn’t happening.

 

McGrath is now emeritus professor in science and religion at the University of Oxford –

Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph

The central thesis of his new book, Rethinking Christianity, is that what the likes of Ash heard is absolutely correct.

 

The sea of faith around these islands is rising. “I am seeing,” he tells me, “a growth in young people wanting to talk about Christianity. Others have seen it, but right now no one really wants to emphasise it. It is probably best just to let it happen.”

 

The burnt fingers at the Bible Society, coupled with a still extant British reluctance to talk about Christianity – “We don’t do God”, as Alastair Campbell once put it, on behalf of Tony Blair – appear to have warned many commentators off. Not McGrath, though. This academic and author, best known as the biographer and champion of CS Lewis – both men were born in Belfast, albeit McGrath’s accent gives no hint of it – likes to step up when others hold back. He was, 20 years ago, the first leading Christian to lock horns in public with Richard Dawkins, following the publication of the evolutionary biologist’s global bestseller, The God Delusion.

 

In public debates with Dawkins, he dismissed the claims of the “New Atheists” that Christianity was a fraud. Dawkins and his sort, McGrath now says, “were aggressively asserting atheist beliefs, but posing as if they were telling incontestable truths”.

 

Damien Mackey: But see e.g. my article:

 

Hawking and Dawkins - science fiction cosmology

 

(2) Hawking and Dawkins - science fiction cosmology

 

In response, McGrath and his wife, Joanna Collicutt, a clinical psychologist and Anglican vicar, published a strong defence of religion titled The Dawkins Delusion. “I probably unwisely allowed myself to have a reasonably high profile,” he reflects.

 

Dawkins has, in recent weeks, been celebrating the 20th anniversary of The God Delusion, making appearances and writing articles (including in this paper). But the scientist is the deluded one, McGrath suggests. “The New Atheism seems to have tanked. It’s on its way out, because people have seen that it was never really answering the big questions.”

 

McGrath connects the revival of interest in Christianity with those years. “After my book came out in 2007,” he says, “a lot of young people who have come to Oxford contacted me, wanting to talk and tell me what their experiences were.” He thinks of those youngsters as two distinct groups: those who sought him out in the immediate aftermath of The Dawkins Delusion, and those who’ve done the same in the past decade. (In between, McGrath removed himself from the fray for six years, from 2008 to 2014, teaching at King’s College, London.)

 

“In the first period,” he explains, “their questions were all very defensive. ‘How on earth do we defend Christianity in the face of this [New Atheist] onslaught?’

 

They were mainly Christians – but [there were] also those outside Christianity who were interested in it but thought it was now an intellectual no-go area thanks to Dawkins.”

 

In response to Richard Dawkins (photographed for The Telegraph in July), McGrath published

a strong defence of religion titled The Dawkins Delusion - Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph

 

In 2014, after he had returned to Oxford and become professor of science and religion, the requests to meet him started coming in again. This time, however, the discussions were very different. “The tone and the subject of the questions had changed. In these conversations, there was a revival of interest – of people looking, and seeing Christianity as able to answer the questions they were posing.”

 

In McGrath’s experience, an increasingly uncertain world – politically, socially, economically and environmentally – has made many young people look again at religion. So, when they ask to talk to him, what guidance does he give them?

“That as human beings we are all looking for meaning, significance, purpose – and more than that. In my view, Christianity can engage all of these significantly and persuasively. This goes beyond beliefs, to where we’re dealing with the deepest longings and aspirations of humanity.”

 

….

 

McGrath has a clear advantage, to a new generation of seekers, in helping them hear those answers. He has walked the same path. He was a convinced atheist when he arrived at Oxford in 1971 as an 18-year-old undergraduate to study chemistry. “I grew up in the 1960s,” he recalls, “and got caught up in the atheist zeitgeist. I was convinced we were all on the brink of a new progressive, godless age.”

 

Among other things, in the sectarian atmosphere of 1960s Northern Ireland – torn between Protestantism and Catholicism – atheism felt like an escape. “As a 16-year-old, it was obvious. No religion, no religious tensions, no violence. End of problem.”

His parents weren’t “particularly religious”, he says, though enough for young Alister to keep his atheism to himself. As he arrived in Oxford, however, he was looking forward to meeting other atheists and deepening his attachment to it.

 

“But most atheists I met – and there were plenty, because it was so fashionable – just assumed that atheism was the obvious thing for an intelligent person to embrace. It did not require any further intellectual justification.” (Rather like Dawkins, as McGrath sees him.)

 

And then, among McGrath’s fellow chemists, this serious-minded atheist undergraduate found Christians who were only too willing to challenge him in conversation. “And they eventually overcame the seawalls of my defence, if I can put it like that.”

 

McGrath began going to church. It was CS Lewis “more than anyone”, though, who brought him back to God. “Reading his books was my introduction to an intellectually intelligent form of Christianity that was also highly accessible. Through him, I saw that Christianity was not just something at a spiritual level, but could be sustained intellectually.”

 

He continued his chemistry work to postgraduate level, but at the same time read for a theology degree.

 

CS Lewis’s books provided an ‘introduction to an intellectually intelligent form of Christianity’: McGrath (pictured at Oxford in 2005) - Corbis via Getty Images/Andrew Fox

 

It made him the perfect candidate in 2014 for Oxford’s professorship in science and religion. Those two spheres have, in the past four centuries, had a difficult relationship. Take the case of Galileo Galilei, declared a heretic in 1633 and put under house arrest for daring to contradict Rome and insist that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

 

Damien Mackey: But, for quite a different twist on Galileo, see my article:

 

Machiavelli in the name Achitophel, Galileo Galilei in the name Gamaliel

 

(3) Machiavelli in the name Achitophel, Galileo Galilei in the name Gamaliel

 

But McGrath suggests that he is witnessing a new rapprochement between the disciplines.

“It is much more convivial now. A lot more scientists are now feeling more confident in talking about their faith. Science is very good at helping us understand how our world functions, but when it comes to moral values or existential meaning – well, no.”

 

What of artificial intelligence? “I could use AI to tell me where to buy pizza, but it doesn’t know what a pizza is. It is a linguistic world which is derived from observing human beings.” Still, he doesn’t think it’s to be dismissed. “We need to have our eyes wide open at the deep questions it raises, and the risk of crossing a particularly dangerous frontier.”

 

If he’s sceptical of the claims being made about AI, what about the charge regularly directed at the Church of England – namely, that it’s in terminal decline?

 

“I am very sympathetic to Anglicanism, and attend my local Anglican church, but I was disappointed by Justin Welby, who wasn’t particularly inspirational or an original thinker. And Sarah Mullally is the same.”

 

….

 

The BBC isn’t helping, he believes, having cut its religious output hugely in recent decades. “It is losing its way in terms of coverage of religion. I do find myself wishing that they would just have serious theologians just talking…” He pauses for a moment, then adds, in a rare flash of humour: “But I appreciate that that would not attract very many listeners.”

 

On the positive side, though, he feels he is “seeing a quiet re-entry of religion into the political domain”. He points to the Prime Minister, who speaks of the influence of his Catholic upbringing, and the Leader of the Opposition, who has spoken openly about her relationship with faith. I add that there are noisier candidates: Reform, like other Right-wing groups across Europe, has been trying to draw Christianity into their arguments around national identity; one proposed policy, for instance, would ban disused Christian churches from being repurposed as mosques. What does McGrath think of such actors? “There is this new interest [in Christianity], and different people are taking that in different directions,” he says diplomatically. “Some are more appropriate than others.”

 

What he wants to see above all: a return of Christian virtues to public life. “We are living in a culture where what is good is ‘what I want’. What we need is for people to be challenged, with a concept of good that is bigger than any one of us.”

 

Rethinking Christianity: A Thoughtful Guide to a Life-Changing Faith (TN Nelson, £14.99) is out now