Berlin WSCF Blog
I will fly to Berlin on 18 June to attend the General Assembly of the World Student Christian Federation on behalf of the Australian Student Christian Movement. It is an exciting honour to be able to do this. ASCM has been my spiritual home, as I have sought to integrate faith and reason in philosophy and religion. This journey to Berlin represents a sort of pilgrimage, combining my university studies in German philosophy and language with a critical approach to Christianity. Berlin is a place I have wanted to go to all my life (or at least since I was 20). The WSCF assembly runs from 23 to 30 June, so I have a few days in Berlin before it starts, and will then stay there until 8 July, with no commitments as yet. My only plans are to participate as fully as I can in the assembly, and to write a short blog every day, trying to be as honest as I can about what I see and what has brought me to this point in life, across my varied interests.
Christianity is such a vexed and controversial topic. I am a regular churchgoer, and an active participant in a range of church activities, but my approach to faith is primarily philosophical, looking to stringently examine and critique all assumptions against the primary values of logic and evidence. That leads me to the view that the meaning of all faith claims is primarily symbolic, not literal, and that all supernatural language has meaning only in so far as it symbolises natural truth.
At my church, Kippax Uniting Church in Canberra, our minister Karyl Davison yesterday preached on ideas that I felt relate well to this perspective, rejecting the church creeds in favour of the simple creed that God is love, and suggesting we are in the middle of a new reformation of Christianity. Such an approach creates an ethical coherence around faith in Christ, while placing the entirety of traditional theology into doubt. That is a complex perspective that most people find hard to understand, but it is something on which I warmly welcome courteous dialogue.
I hope the WSCF assembly in Berlin will be well placed to build engagement and momentum around such ideas. The long history of WSCF since its foundation in 1895 has centred on the theme of being the church ahead of the church, providing a safe and open space for radical exploration of new ideas against an ethic of humility, intelligence and respect. WSCF now finds itself at a crossroads, with traditional faith in disrepute within progressive communities. Restoring credibility to Christianity requires a systematic approach that finds its grounding in scientific knowledge rather than in traditional belief. This is a paradigm shift that calls for careful and informed conversation, aiming to produce a transformative vision of vital relevance for our world today.
Some big themes where a coherent Christian faith could usefully comment include climate change, the Ukraine war, inequality, social fracturing in the context of social media, and human identity. These are some of the topics I hope to discuss in this blog, while also recording some observations of the events of the assembly.
I plan to circulate this blog publicly at https://rtulip.net/blog/ and https://www.facebook.com/AustralianSCM as well as providing weekly email updates.
