Bishop: Our Society imperiled without Biblical faith

The Bishop of London has warned that fundamental concepts vital to British society [and other Western Societies] will be unsustainable without a Christian underpinning.

The Rt Revd Richard Chartres said Britain’s culture and civilisation were founded on the Bible, and expressed concern at any undermining of that foundation.

Rt Revd Chartres, who gave the sermon at last month’s Royal Wedding, was speaking at a symposium in the House of Lords on the Bible.

He said: “The economy and politics must have ground beneath them. In Britain that ground has been biblical since our earliest days – and you do not sacrifice that without sacrificing much of what has been built upon that ground.”

The Bishop also commented that concepts such at dignity and tolerance would be “very difficult to sustain without a Christian ground”.

Read it all here.

It is clear, if we are willing to look, that in some societies there simply is not the same reverence for concepts such as human dignity and tolerance as we in the Western nations (those with an undeniable Christian intellectual heritage) take for granted. Precisely because we take them for granted, we do not see the connection between fundamental Christian beliefs about the world and the origin of concepts such as human rights or respect for human dignity, for example (the logic of the US Declaration of Independence illustrates this wonderfully). It was precisely out of cultures inundated by the Christian faith - and the Biblical belief that humans bear the image of God - that these ideas of human dignity arose to begin with.

The Western (particularly European) societies run the risk of cutting off the branch upon which they sit by marginalizing the theistic (particularly Christian) principles upon which so many of our cherished political assumptions are founded. If we reject the foundations of these ideas, we may find our societies unable to provide a satisfactory answer the simple question "Why should we respect the fundamental human dignity of others?" (Especially if we are stronger than they and fear no reprisals).

I suspect that we need only look to the human rights record of atheistic communism to see what at least can ultimately happen when the voice of Abraham's God is forcibly ejected from the political arena.

For more upon these lines check this post.