(For Gail Edwards)

Was talking to a woman who's working on a doctoral dissertation in an odd and interesting area – a sort of cross between history, history of education, and history of religion; it's really a very sensible thesis topic, but it does cross the lines between disciplines. She reports that it' s getting harder and harder to do that at her university. Each department wants to draw sharp lines around its own turf, refusing to let other departments slide a toe over into its area and refusing to slide a toe over into theirs. These turf wars have been making her academic life distinctly Interesting. In the Chinese curse sense.

I don't know how the image of lobsters came into my head, but once there, I could see the metaphor... Lobsters have hard, well-defined outside boundaries because they wear their bones on the outside. They have exoskeletons, that being the fancy-pants name for wearing your physical hardware on the outside while keeping your tender tissues on the inside. Organisms at a more sophisticated level of development reverse this simple architecture: we keep our hardware on the inside (de head bone connected to de neck bone) and wrap our endoskeleton tightly around with softer tissues (well, okay, sometimes they're not-so-tightly wrapped, but that's another matter).

Now, God knows I am fond of lobsters, especially plain boiled with melted butter. But I do prefer my own skeletal arrangement. I can see the other side's advantages: hard-out-soft-in gives you much better protection from predators, which is why gentlemen some 500 years ago sometimes encased their persons in plate steel. But when you attach elastic muscle to tough bone, you can do all sorts of physically interesting things that an exoskeletal beastie can't do. Think levers and elastic bands. A lobster can scuttle, but it can't jump. It's a sort of trade-off between safety and potential, as the plate-armoured gentlemen discovered at Agincourt.

In addition, if the lobster's going to grow at all, it's going to have to moult, and that's a delicate and dangerous business, leaving the beast pathetically vulnerable while it's still in the soft-shell state. For us endoskeletal types, growth is a somewhat smoother and less hazardous process.

Friend and I were agreeing that her university's departments were choosing the lobster model: making hard boundaries in the interests of protecting their turfs, thereby reducing the anxiety and uncertainty that go with fluid boundaries and making themselves feel safe and pure and unconfused about things. They do have a point, in that chaos is unproductive and you do have to have some structure to things – we do need some sort of skeleton, whether we keep it outside or in. But their rigidity spoke more of fearfulness than of setting clear boundaries.

Sometimes the mind goes “click”, hauling in some stray thing from the sidelines, however improbably. The day after the lobster chat, I was reading something about the ancient phrase “lex orandi, lex credendi,” which very roughly translated means, “the greater law is prayer; the lesser law is belief.” (Somebody is bound to correct my translation here.) Or put another way, it might mean “you get to belief by prayer” or “belief follows prayer” or something in that neck of the woods.

But another model holds the opposite: unless you can say the Creed literally, believing every word, you can't call yourself a Christian at all – that is, what makes us Christian is not how we behave, but what we say we believe. Maybe it's just me, but I see a parallel here with the university departments my friend was talking about. First we'll sharply delimit the turf. Then we'll think about what we can do within those boundaries. What matters first and most is the boundary – how we differentiate our turf from the other guy's.

We feel we have to have Absolute Truth nailed to the wall, for the alternative is chaos. But that's being lobsterish: it's putting your strength, your hardness, at your boundary with the rest of the world, fronting the rest of creation with a tough hard shell. That approach is great if what motivates you is fear of disorder --if you think that without hard credal boundaries, people's belief is going to be like a bowl of spilled applesauce, running all over the table and dripping on the floor. It 's a deeply untrustful way to operate.

There's another way of doing things, and I think it works better: that is, to wear your beliefs as a framework to hang your actions on – to wrap love and concern for others around the core of belief. That way of operation does require a certain amount of trust. It says, yes, laws are important, but we also need discernment; yes, belief is important, but we have to leave room for both doubt and mystery; yes, community is important, but we have to respect people's honest differences. It fronts the world not with a sharp, hard boundary, but with arms opened, with openness and welcome, not with suspicion and mistrust, with respect for others instead of insisting that we 're Right and have all the Answers.

Churches can conform to either model, and I can think of examples of each. Anglicanism has always tended in the endoskeletal direction: we do have our beliefs, and they are strong and solid, but we don't set hard, sharp boundaries or insist on Absolute Truth. Some say this makes us wishy-washy. I say it's our greatest strength. The lobster-model may be simple and apparently strong, but it doesn't leave much room for flexibility or growth, or for the sort of strength you can get by levering your legbones with muscle and tendon.

No, I can't see my bones; I don't wear them on my outside. I've never had a good look at my left tibia. But I know my bones are there: the mass of pelvis, the strong femurs, my hard round skull-bowl, delicate handbones, intricate play of clavicle and shoulderbones... I even know about the three tiny stirrupbones in my inner ear. Just because I keep my bone-strength under my softer outside doesn't mean I'm a Boneless Wonder.

Similarly, I can't always explain my beliefs: some of them are a mystery to me, others are inarticulate. I can say the Creed with trust, but I don't need to examine anyone else's conscience about it. If Anglican “doctrine” tends to be unspoken, like the English constitution, I'm actually more relieved than I am worried. I know the bones are there. I don't have to see them.

After all, our Lord chose to be incarnate not as a lobster but as a human being. He was always one for seekers and sinners and people who were terribly confused. He had far less use for people who knew what was what and were very clear on Law and judgment, and who chose to regard those who were less clear and pure than they as inadequate. He put Love before the Law, time and again.

I'll take my inner-bone model every time. But oh, sometimes, I would just about kill for a half-decent lobster roll...