Sergei Torop is no more crazy than several people who write to me on and off . . . but nor has he really anything much to do with the Jesus of the gospels, the first-century man from Nazareth. He sounds very much like a low-grade version of the sort of self-help religion you get in popular bookshops: bits and pieces of this and that.

Put it another way: if this man is the real Jesus, then not only the one we have in the gospels, but most of the others whom scholars have tried to 'reconstruct' from time to time, were barking up the wrong tree. If God had really wanted to give us late 20th Century religious gobbledygook, why would he have bothered to send Jesus to tell us about the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven?

I don't think you are crazy for asking the question, but you'd have to be crazy to see this man as anything other than either seriously deluded or a muddled hoaxer.

The stand-off between secularism and fundamentalism is getting bigger across the western world -- and the churches are of course caught up in it, on both sides. I'm intrigued, as a British onlooker on the US scene, to observe just how much weight is given to 'religion' in one way or another whereas in my country, despite (or perhaps because of?) or official 'establishment', we more or less don't do it like that...

Both fundamentalism and secularism are of course high modernist features, and both are well capable of being deconstructed within postmodernity (thank goodness). The question is, what will replace them? And when will our politicians, on both sides of the Atlantic, notice that postmodern irony has eaten away at the core of their shrill vote-for-me-and-it'll-all-come-right certainties?

The astonishing misrepresentation of Archbishop Rowan in virtually all newspapers over the last few days, and the scorn and anger which this has fueled, have caused many people within the church to ask what on earth is going on. The issues are complex, but let me try to highlight the key points.

Obviously it would be good for people to read the whole lecture, which is available on line at his website together with further clarification. There is an excellent summary and discussion of the whole issue by Andrew Goddard available on the Fulcrum website.

First, the lecture which Rowan gave was the start of a series organized by and for the legal profession, about the nature of law. He was not making a public statement about his belief in Jesus (people have asked me ‘why doesn’t he speak about Jesus?’ and the answer is ‘he does, a great deal of the time, but this wasn’t that sort of occasion’). He was addressing some of the most serious and far-reaching questions which face us both in Britain and throughout western culture, and was doing so with the sensitivity and intellectual rigor which the occasion, and his audience, rightly demanded. We should be grateful that we have an Archbishop capable of such work, not demand that his every word be instantly comprehensible by the casual uninformed onlooker. If I ask someone to fix my car, or my computer, I don’t expect to understand everything they say about the technicalities; rather, I’m glad someone out there knows what’s going on and can do what’s necessary.

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