In 687 John was consecrated Bishop of Hexham in succession to Bishop Eata, one of the twelve disciples of St Aidan and the teacher of St Cuthbert. During his time at Hexham, John ordained the future St Bede as priest. He was a good pastoral bishop, a man who loved the Scriptures, and a patient teacher. Like many of his contemporaries he also had a deep seated need for prayerful solitude and used to retire to a quiet place on the banks of the Tyne for prayer and the study of Scriptures, especially during the season of Lent. In 705 he was appointed to the See of York in succession to St Bosa, himself a former monk of the monastery at Whitby. John remained in the diocese for 12 years but the call of solitude remained strong, and four years before his death he retired to Beverley to a religious house he founded there.

  John died on 7 May 721, having worked for more than thirty years as a bishop. His shrine became famous up and down the country and was considered to be one of the chief places of devotion in England for many years.

  Many miracles of healing are ascribed to John, and the popularity of his cult was a major factor in the prosperity of Beverley during the Middle Ages. He was celebrated for his scholarship as well as for his virtues. He was canonized in 1037. In 1541, his shrine was destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII. About a hundred years later workmen discovered a vault under the floor of the Minster’s nave. The inscription on it indicates that the contents contained the relics of St John. In 1738, when the present Minster floor was laid, these relics were disinterred and replaced in the same position with an arched brick vault over them. The inscription on the tomb now reads:

  Blessed Albert was born in Valle d’Ogna near Bergamo in 1214. As a married man he was known for his generosity to the poor, a virtue for which his wife reproached him. Upon the death of his wife, being childless, he left his father’s farm and went to Cremona where he lived in poverty. His poverty was a witness to a group of heretics there who boasted of their own poverty. Attracted by the life of Saint Dominic he joined the Brothers of Penance, which later became the Order of Penance of Saint Dominic, and lived at the Dominican priory. He died on May 7, 1279.

  It is convenient, in a world where journalists see everything as politics, to treat doctrine as what we decide to believe. But it is dangerous, because in the end the whole point of our encounter with God is that it is an encounter with Truth Itself, whereas if everything is politics, then nothing is definitely true: if we argue for long enough, we can decide that apples fall upwards.

  Theology is a science. It determines things in the Surgeon General sense, not in the tax sense. When we decide that we all need to celebrate Easter on the same date, and then argue about which date, that is like tax or deciding which side of the road to drive on. It is not science, and it is not truth. But then again, it is not theology either, but religion. Theology asks ‘What is true?’ while religion asks ‘What shall we do about it?’, rather as engineering asks ‘What shall we do about it all?’ about the laws of physics.

  Theology is a science, and it uses the methods of science. That is not some unrealistic aspiration. It is not an invention of mediaeval academics. We see it in action at the Council of Jerusalem in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

  A science has data, and a scientific discussion starts from the data and makes sense of them. So the Council hears one important item of data – the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the family of the Gentile Cornelius – which conflicts with certain ideas of what it means to be chosen, and righteous, and justified – ideas which have themselves come from other data, from the accumulation of scripture and salvation history.

  The scientific task is to make sense of the whole.

  Even in Luke’s compressed account, it is clear that the Council is not having a ‘What shall we choose to say?’ discussion but a ‘What is true?’ discussion: that is to say, a scientific one. Such discussions are of a fundamentally different nature from political or decision-making ones. It is not about getting a majority on the committee. It is about taking the data, however discordant they may seem, and making sense of them all. That is what science is. Is this an impossible goal, or a possible one? In the case of the physical world we believe that it can be done because we believe that the physical world really exists. When it comes to theological matters we know that it can be done because we know that we are commanded to love the Lord our God with all our mind: that is to say, we are told that God makes sense.

  Arguments will never cease, of course. That is the glory of having one race made up of many minds. But we do need to remember that when we believe, the root of our belief is not decision (let’s all drive on the right, or let’s all drive on the left) but truth. Then our arguments, and even our disagreements, can be truly scientific in the original, root sense, of the word: ‘productive of knowledge’.

  In the earliest centuries all vestments were white – the white of baptismal purity and of the robes worn by the armies of the redeemed in the Apocalypse, washed white in the blood of the Lamb. As the Church grew secure enough to be able to plan her liturgy, she began to use colour so that our sense of sight could deepen our experience of the mysteries of salvation, just as incense recruits our sense of smell and music that of hearing. Over the centuries various schemes of colour for feasts and seasons were worked out, and it is only as late as the 19th century that they were harmonized into their present form.