ABSTRACT
Iris Murdoch’s attitude to Christianity may be described as ambivalent. On the one hand, her biographers document her interest in Christianity and note that she sometimes referred to herself as a Christian. But her philosophical writings demonstrate a clear rejection of belief in a personal God and, as A. N. Wilson records, she talked constantly of a desire to find or found ‘a new Christianity which has discarded the fiction of God and focusses on the spiritual Christ’ (2004: 213). This chapter attempts to construct a systematic account of Murdoch’s ‘new Christianity’ and its relationship with Plato’s Form of the Good. I examine one key objection—the claim that the idea of a personal God is so central to the scriptures, doctrines and practices of Christianity that a Godless Christianity cannot be regarded as a form of Christianity. I argue that Murdoch has no need to dispense with the concept of God, which can be construed as personal in a metaphorical sense, which is compatible with many of the teachings and practices of Christianity.
