In saying this I do not want even to pretend that the need for friendship in an active, emotional and committed way is not the most urgent spiritual need of our time. It is. The friendship of Christ answers that need. Once found, the Christian wants to make it known to others. The Churches call this evangelisation.
“Ho Everyone who thirsts,
Come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
Come buy and eat."
The Vitality of the Spirit
In these words of Isaiah 55:13, Christians understand, and must further, the simple challenge of evangelisation today. In criticising Alpha, I do not wish to make any criticism of the Anglican church with whom the Catholic church is enjoying a friendship which has been the priceless fruit of hard work. These efforts have been put in by people of good faith at all levels of involvement and with much self-sacrificing love. If I thought the Alpha programme did justice to the Anglican Church, I would not be writing this. Nor do I wish to criticise the Charismatic movement, of which the late Pope John Paul II himself has said, "Because of the Spirit, the Church preserves a continual youthful vitality and the Charismatic renewal is an eloquent manifestation of this vitality to-day , a bold statement of what the "Spirit is saying to the churches "(Rev.2;7)" in his Address to the Sixth International Leaders' conference, Rome, 15 May 1987. Yet as Cardinal Newman once wrote in the Tamworth Reading Room Part Five ”You cannot have Christianity and not have differences". If these differences pose problems then the problem must be addressed. There is no solution more attractive than that which subtly addresses the wrong problem. The true problem is that though Christians are made in God’s image, they cannot come to him except through His help, entirely. The wrong problem is to hold that men and women are only faintly made in His image and that to polish it up, the Spirit must enter their lives.
The Universal Gift of the Spirit
Like all short-term appeals, Alpha succeeds at the cost of distorting what is relatively unimportant and ignoring what is vital. What is vital is that God made men and women unconditionally in His image. Our human nature is, therefore, created that men and women should come to him. This could not be claimed by the God of the Alpha course. For Alpha it is only because they have been offered a friendship with God, in faith, that Christians want to come to Him. Alpha plays down the call God makes to their lives by divorcing it from our basic nature. Yet as Christian teaching insists “capax Dei; capax entis”: nature has a capacity for God. This is why as a church we have been given sacraments which take the image of God implicit in our human nature and turn it to what is completely invisible and supernatural, through Christ's death and resurrection. Because nature appears to be insufficient for Alpha, the supernatural is too much for Alpha. Distrust of what God created us for, always turns into a distrust of what He calls us to. It is as if God were capable of some strategic error in allowing mankind to fall in the first place and had to send his Son to make a church as a kind of First Aid centre. Now that His church too seems to be getting into trouble, a sacramental repair kit seems to be needed. This is why he claims “baptism in the Spirit” to have almost sacramental status.
The Call of the Spirit
However, any claim that what has come to be called "baptism in the Spirit" is an integral part of Christian Initiation cannot be reconciled with the teaching of the Church. The implications of this confused belief for the doctrine of prayer, of faith, of justification and the mystery of our predestination and for our understanding of the Church itself are so massive that no simple Catholic "add" on, no matter how orthodox in itself, can correct the impairment of the vision of faith that Alpha suffers from. The criticism is radical. It is not a piecemeal twitting over a healthy difference. The Alpha Plus programme presents the Christian with a deformed and empty God who has given men and women no natural rationality with which we can know him, only a narrow and subjective experience of friendship. It presents them with a God who died for them to show how much he needs them. Who rose again only on condition that they have a relationship with him. One who will answer our prayers only if they enjoy this special relationship with Him and accordingly makes some and not all men and women, children of God. It presents them with a Spirit that only fills the hearts of some Christians. It presents them with a God whose sacrifice on the cross did not justify them in our supernatural calling, but only in some deal whereby he bailed them out of a natural debt they couldn't, or wouldn't pay.
The Spirit of Real Change
As such I want my criticisms to be a loving not a destructive one. Nicky Gumbel is a good man and yet his love and enthusiasm generates a high-tide of misunderstanding that can tear away the carefully constructed breakwaters of doctrinal truth, leaving more vulnerable churches in its wake. My defense is only another defense of a fundamental truth of faith that all are called to salvation by the Father through the life and death of His Son who sends His Spirit upon all that they should respond, by repenting, converting and being brought to Him. The Father calls men and women through their natural lives, not contrary to them. For that reason He calls them to Him through His Church which is a church of Scripture and Tradition, united in the voice of the teaching Magisterium. Through it they consume the body of Christ which is the Church, as the Church is the body of Christ united with the assembled who are the church. It is a sign of itself, held aloft before the world in prophetic vigour. Christ comes into men and women's lives, not as some figment of therapy to be drawn into their darkness, but as a reality more real than life to draw Christians out into His light.
- Gumbel, Nicky (2003)Questions of Life London, Kingsway Publications.
- Gumbel, Nicky (2001) Searching Issues London, Kingsway Publications
- Gumbel, Nicky et al. The Alpha Manual (2005) London, Alpha International Publications
- [Newman, Cardinal John Henry](1841), The Tamworth reading room. Letters on an address delivered by Sir Robert Peel, Bart., M.P. on the establishment of a reading room at Tamworth. By Catholicus, Times 5-27th February 1841, Part 5'
- John Paul II, Pope (1987):Address to the Sixth International Leaders' Conference, Rome, 15 May
Duncan McGibbon - By contributing writer, Bath (UK) Institute Convenor and Wells Festival Prize-Winner, Duncan McGibbon
