Thank you Harry Blamires.

I had to prepare an end of year sermon for our congregation and chose the subject of Our Spiritual Warfare. I decided to rework an existing sermon based on Ephesians 6:10-12 in the hope of improving it (I don't think it happened - too many thoughts came). It occurred to me, however, that Paul's reminder that we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers points to the inwardness and essential spiritual nature of the conflict. I also thought about the important role of deception in the enemy's strategy.

It occurred to me that we do not think about these things as we ought. If we catch ourselves thinking about Christian things, we are easily fooled into believing that we are thinking about them Christianly. In a moment of 'theological flashback' I thought of two older books, Lloyd-Jones' Conversions: Psychological and Spiritual, a critique of Willam Sargent's Battle For The Mind and Harry Blamires' The Christian Mind. The second of these, written in the early 1960s has always had a prophetic flavour for me; a kind of primitive precursor of Wells' God In The Wasteland.

Blamires wrote from an Anglican perspective about the abandonment of the Christian mind and exposed what he called the 'schizophrenic type', especially in the church hierarchy, who hops in and out of his Christian mentality. Blamires believed that British Christians had sold out to the secularists and that they were incapable of thinking Christianly even about Christian things.

We are a good deal further up the creek now and there's still no sign of a paddle. A couple of weeks ago a Dutch Ph.D. student told me that he was researching ways in which psychotherapy could improve the pastoral ministry. In his mind it did not savour of a sell-out to the secularists. He felt that too much pastoral counselling was intuitive and unscientific. I wanted to believe that 'unscientific' meant unbiblical or untheological but it was too much to hope for.

Back to Blamires ! He thought the sell-out to the secularists was partly the result of reluctance by Christians to stand up and be counted. Perhaps we have reached that bend in the creek where reticence has given way to enthusiasm - not for objective truth or anything like that but for cultural relevance and the felt need to communicate. It puts us under such huge pressure doesn't it?