The heady scent of honeysuckle wafts on the evening breezes and flaunts its multicoloured new outfit in a July which has hardly achieved the status of summer yet. In fact everything in the gardens of West London is burgeoning, the result of a great deal of wet weather in recent weeks. The natural beauty around us, while nurtured by a succession of gardeners, is beyond us to sustain without loss. Without strict control it does in fact take on a life of its own - a wilderness. We are more certainly in control of things that we have invented. Things may go wrong but we can, eventually, find out why they do so. We can investigate, rationally, what could be the solution. There is also previous experience upon which we can build so as to go forward.

It is all so different when we come to problems about our relationship with God, particularly today when few openly admit that there is a God. In the past four centuries, when our progress in understanding more about the universe, the world and ourselves has outstripped anything we achieved in the previous millennia, religious believers have often felt quite insecure when traditional ideas about God have been vigorously challenged. All through the process of the beginnings and growth of scientific discovery and analysis, traditional religious institutions fell back upon what was regarded as the secure fortress of ideas in the biblical writings and what had been deduced from them over the centuries. It was not that earlier centuries found no difficulty in some of the statements in the biblical writings but they allegorised them so that in effect they became related to something more rational. But when archeological discoveries in the 19th century showed without doubt that the world was not created about 4000 years ago, the crisis of falling back upon a book of words alone was revealed for its weakness as a foundation of believable ideas.

The real problem facing the religious institutions was in fact ideas about God which had accumulated over the centuries as part superstition, part mythical which had very little to do with what the writers of the biblical records understood about what they were writing! Well, yes, they were people of their own time, prone to the influences of society around them - from the 8th century authors of the Hebrew scriptures to the late first century Christian writers. The astonishing thing is that scholarship over the past 150 years has been able to demonstrate more than ever before what were the real reasons which lay behind these voluminous and much copied writings. In other words, the biblical writings, regarded from a scholarly point of view, can still be one of the illustrations for a rational basis of faith.The idea that, somehow, what they wrote was to be regarded as the absolute and final words of God to humanity, probably never entered the minds of any of the biblical writers. Many of them would be astonished that in the 21st century there are problems of a God thought about in the terms of magic, myth and superstition which have accumulated over the centuries.

So perhaps, in the light of all that we know about ourselves, the cosmos and the original intentions of the biblical writers, we need to have the courage to say - if we believe in God - that he is at least as personal as we are and that our belief entails the idea that we are to be trusted as rational human beings by him. Yes, we are all at times irrational in our behaviour. But we do not on that account fall back on the idea that society must only be governed - apart from criminal acts and the judicial system - by a book of rules. For those who believe there is a God, that is a rational decision, despite the fact that there are no proofs of God that we have ever been able to come up with. For such people the inspirational content of the greatest of the biblical writings is sheer wonder, enabling them to think even greater things about such a God who treats them as human beings with a future. The secret of such a God is that he is a lover rather than a critic and an autocratic despot laying down rules for humanity to abide by. The real God is the one whom Jesus depicted in the most famous of his parables -

'[The prodigal] set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion, he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.'