"Britain's most famous vicar" RICHARD COLES quizzed about his beliefs and lifestyle

Richard: Yes I do. I think I would have a less high doctrine of Scripture from most of my evangelical friends in the sense that I am at home in that classical Anglican formula of Scripture, Reason and Tradition - the three-legged school of Anglicanism - and so Scripture, held respectfully in dialogue with reason and tradition would be the model that I. . . that would be the box that I would tick if required to do so.

But I love Scripture and my academic fields have been in New Testament, and New Testament contextual translation in particular. And it continues to change me. The more time I give it and the more careful attention I give it the more it makes its home within me and sends out those vibrations unlike anything else. It changes my life, my vision, my view, and so on.

Tony: I wrote a song years ago about the Scriptures. It's called "The Book That's Reading Me".

Richard: Yes, exactly. The revelation for me was when I learned New Testament Greek and started to read Paul in the original Greek. It was just a revelation. It continues to be a revelation: the excitement, the novelty, this new thing that has come into the world; and Paul's extraordinarily multi-dimensioned response to the Gospel of Christ is something which I find un-endingly. . . you know the fathomless riches of Christ - anexicniaston ploutos - Ephesians 3:8, isn't it. That would be my thing.

Tony: So by having New Testament Greek you think that's brought out the nuances that may be lost in standard translations?

Richard: I found it revelatory, yes, revelatory, to read Paul in Greek. I suppose it is because I was brought up in a tradition where Scripture would most often be heard in the Authorised version and in the context of a very particular traditional liturgical setting. And so to all of a sudden then encounter Paul in the Greek as this almost tumultuous outpouring of excitement and dazzling vision and. . . you can almost hear it; it is so immediate and urgent; it was revelatory and continues to be revelatory. And people slag off Paul, particularly in the liberal-church traditions that I'm in at home; and that's a woeful misreading.

Tony: Talking about slagging-off; liberals verses evangelicals do a lot of that. A lot of them, strangely, are more likely to critique their fellow-Christians than they are to critique some of the world's systems which need to be torn down.

Richard: Quite.

Tony: I mean, for me, I was once interviewed by a liberal journalist and the first question I was asked, was "How long have you been a fundamentalist?" That's a very pejorative word and fundamentalist surely isn't the same as evangelical. Surely it's not.

Richard: No, it's not the same as evangelical.

Tony: So, really we're almost getting back to where we started. Two opposing forces: evangelicalism and liberalism.

Richard: It is all so complicated, isn't it? The minute you try to label stuff it is very elusive. I have a very good friend who is a conservative evangelical and I kind of reliably know that he and I are going to think really differently about nearly everything. And actually it is very valuable. I mean we like each other very much and we are good friends. . . but also the tensions, the differences, even the assumptions. . . And there is this Freudian idea of the narcissism of small difference: that actually, you are much more likely, as you say, to feel antagonistic to your brother or your sister as you are towards a stranger or the enemy because you are close.

One of the features of that, it seems to me, is that sometimes merciless and ruthless debate that occurs between churchmanships, if I can put it in that way, is not because we are different but because we are close. That intensifies these feelings of difference. And sometimes we are generally very far apart on things.

Here's a good one: my friend takes me sometimes to evangelical services which have a kind of charismatic thing about them. I always feel completely out of place in these things because I don't know how to bang. . . it's not my thing. He gets very cross with me and says "Why can't you just bloody well join in?"

I've often thought about that and I think if I did I'd be faking it. I think in my Father's house there are many mansions. And there is more than one way to skin a cat.