Unlike the England cricket squad, the instinct of humanity's mass is to create boundaries. They not only add to one's prestige but make one feel more secure in the setting of a blank scorecard and the infinity of time and space, spread endlessly behind, in front and above. We ask about beginnings and ends; with the American Spanish philosopher Unanumo, we ask if we are alone in the universe. It is the most ancient of questions and presumably will never go away.

In this elevated company I would not dare use that notorious four-letter word that conjures up the concave structure in Greenwich. There, lately - but not at the D### - the beguiling Time exhibition has made the point clear; man creates and indeed, adapts diverse boundaries in time and space to console and to enhance, to cope with suffering and death and to give meaning to the scrap of the human span. There must have been a start to it all and - like Thomas More lectures indeed - there must surely be an end. There must be surely, said Aristotle, some prime mover to all that starts! Augustine thought that was a very good idea and said it was God; and why not? That was, and had been since thought began, the instinctive affirmation of humanity's mass; man, time, space and universe is a predicate, an object - something acted upon and the product of an unmoved force, a subject - Divine? Supernatural? Transcendent? Wholly Other? God! Give it whatever name you like - and there have been plenty, depending upon your background and especially your language and in turn, your culture, climate, geography - that concatenation of bits and pieces that make one identity almost totally different from another, apart of course, from what they have in common. Give it whatever name you fancy - we are all fascinated with boundaries whether social, spatial or temporal.

Above all, there is need for some explanation for it all. Ancient mythological sciences as with modern phenomenological sciences are driven by the same needs - to know the cause of it all and how it will end. The ancient myths are religious simply because they propose a creator that or who kick-started the whole business and therefore must be honoured in case he or it gets cross and punishes us with a drought or a flood; we must thus do more than our duty, we must do his bidding. The mundane is metaphysical; the routine is reciprocal; the rituals are sacrificial; the author is the authority. The believer is thus bound because invented boundaries are divine disclosures.

For the creationists in the USA there is little doubt. The Book of Genesis is as worthy a contender for a convincing explanation as are big bangs or dark holes; the famous 1925 Monkey Trial in Tennessee of a teacher arrested for teaching evolution and Darwin dramatises the American fascination with science and religion. It was brilliantly filmed and you simply must see "Inherit the Wind" if you get half a chance! Spencer Tracy versus Frederick March for those young enough to remember!

The debate continues - the creationists still hold sway, as you may recall from the media coverage this time last year. The Kansas Board of Education decreed that any scientific theory of evolution or Darwinianism (sic) may not be taught in their schools unless the answer in the Book of Genesis is presented as equally valid - double-think. Rather like that of the rabbi at breakfast whose toast fell butter side up. He knew that an immutable Talmudic law says that one's toast always falls butter side down. After extensive international rabbinic consultations, the rabbi was relieved to know that - like the creationists - his sacred text remained immutable; his toast - he was informed - was buttered on the wrong side!

What would Sir Thomas have made of all this? Had he lived but another eight years, he would have faced the big bang bombshell from Copernicus who claimed that the earth went round the sun and was not after all the centre of the universe. Sir Thomas no doubt would have been quite happy that the Catholic Church refused to recognise this idea until 1758 - it went against everything he believed. Moreover, the nature of the human condition was of much higher significance than any theories that questioned the truth of scripture. That's what comes, he would have said, of putting the text into the hands of the rank and file; what can they possibly make of it? It was dangerous beyond measure and undermined the authority of the church - the custodian and interpreter of its historic text. It is a powerful instance of disparity between the thinking of the sixteenth century and our own. For More, the church was the final authority and no untutored laymen could possibly engage in disputation. We might call it scholarly elitism; Mr. Brown certainly would! More however, epitomised the belief that the practice of Christian scholarship and the formation of doctrine was not at all the business of the individual rather the corporation, the body ecclesia to which, in all matters, the individual was subservient. Thomas More could not do otherwise than run his covert MI6 operations to winkle out heretics importing bibles in English from across the channel. He could watch them burn in Smithfield without turning a hair; he would hardly lament their demise - only their intransigence. He had no sympathy for any - however holy - with gall enough to undermine the political structures and the revealed truth upon which they depended. They would not only burn at the stake, they would burn in all eternity. Such was his unswerving conviction; there's another play to be written.

But all this about creation is only one side of the story. Mankind sets boundaries at both ends and Thomas More had no doubt that however he might conceive the perfect utopian state in the here and now, at the end, there would be judgement and separation followed by an eternal, blissful existence inaugurated by the return of Christ and the beginning of a new age as it says in the book. For the damned, a vision of eternal separation and rejection. These potent images remain. In the wrong hands - as Thomas would have said - it leads to insanity as well as heresy.

On the idea of the last things, Western Christianity has brewed a potent mix; Paradise Lost, Dante and Bosch's painting to conjure images which provide grim adornments on the trellis that fences off the end of time. They are serious and they are comic. One need not look far; those of you who listen to the radio - or the wireless if you prefer, the one without the picture - will have heard the recent News Quiz in which Richard Ingrams or his colleague was sent a cutting from an American Episcopal newspaper. A Californian couple going on holiday to Florida decided that she would stop off in Atlanta to see her sister and he would continue on. That evening, being rather lonely he e-mailed his wife at her sister's. Unfortunately, one digit was wrong and his message went randomly to an episcopal vicarage somewhere. In fact to a house of sorrow - the vicar had died the day before. The family was present to give comfort to the widow who received cards of condolence and, of course, e-mails. Opening her computer the widow gave a scream and fainted. Rushing to her side, the family then read the following: 'My dear wife; I have arrived and checked in; I await your arrival tomorrow. I hope you're on time. Signed, Husband. PS It's very hot down here.' No wonder she fainted; the imagery and metaphors are potently embedded in our psyche, perhaps especially in the USA!

But nowhere it is more obvious than among the millennialists for whom the passing of the year 2000 must have come as a shock. You might also have read recently of the parents who believed the world was about to end and forbade their daughter to take her A-levels. Less innocently the apocalyptic sectarians in Israel were deported last December for fear they would create chaos and inaugurate another world war. It is the belief that God is being served.

Whatever possesses the untutored to fall into such chaos is one question; whatever grips the imaginations of the educated to fall prey to such superstition is another? It is a puzzle addressed by social psychologists, theologians and even the police as we have seen in the trial of the pub-bomber gripped and driven by a belief that he must kill to do the work of God. Thomas More dipped his oar in the same flow; heretics must burn not for any expedient, temporal reason but in the name of God and in the cause of revealed truth. Unlike the deviant, More 's vision of the utopian commonwealth was driven not by reason and rationality alone but both shaped by and subservient to revealed truth. Inspired by Plato's Republic, More envisaged an ideal society to whom revelation was not given. Although this unique essay has inspired reformers ever since, More made it clear that this landscape was false; man drifted into error without divine revelation. Put this essay of 1551 alongside developments in printing, social change and the gradually increasing accessibility of the biblical text and there is a new agenda for the democratising of revealed truth; the individual can have a view and never mind the parsons.

Plato's Republic and More's Utopia simply could not resist the seductive appeal - with all the weight of popes and councils stretching back to St. Peter - that this world was not the end. More's humanism was finally about the care of mankind in the response to the injunction of Jesus to visit the sick, care for the dying and that catalogue of virtues in Matthew 25 which sorted out the men from the boys, the sheep from the goats. More's ethics were driven by obedience before compassion; his humanism would not stretch to the heretic. Contrary to our secular, humanist view, the boundary was not at the end of this life but at the end of creation; the Creator would end the world as he had begun it. Christian doctrine had reinvented the Hebrew wheel and set in motion a terrible force that persists until today. Fundamentalist Christianity turns myth into superstition when believers get lazy, frantic, fearful or all three. The fundamentalist runs the gauntlet of science and turns his back now that science has long since shed its light on the origins of religious beliefs and institutions that sustain them alike. The challenge to classical definitions of end-time boundaries is devastating; science has for some time been committed to a dispassionate analysis of the context and setting from which the boundaries themselves emerged. They are not timeless truths, they are relative to and the product of another age. More would have no time for creationists and even less for millennialists; these are not doctrines but delusions he would have said. The sight and sound of two sledge-hammering labourers striking down a pillar in tandem is a neat image of the co-operation between medieval philosophers and religionists embedding doctrines deep into the western church. Millennialists are frightened and frantic; frightened by man's increasing knowledge and frantic to discern signs of the end and confident that they are in their text - as they read it. Their beliefs must therefore be right, absolute and from on high; Jesus is coming back - the signs are clear; prepare yourself for judgement on this wicked world.

We know that the world may be wicked but this was being said long before Jesus was even thought of. Paul did a powerful reconstruction job on the old Hebrew plan; Jesus arrives at the centre of time and completed creation. He had to return and the new age would begin. More would have said yes but we must nevertheless build the City of God in the here and now. Messrs. Hague and Blair tend to agree.

The millennium came and went not the least because it was the creation of the human imagination - all calendars are. The millennialist's narrative however, demands not a leap of faith so much as intellectual inertia. Likewise, for the creationists, who remain a laughing stock among the rational and even the untutored, their convictions are embedded in a text that is no longer the work of genius but emasculated into a ridiculous fairy tale that defies all intelligent grasp. The millenialists must now go their own way until a new collection of events can be shoe-horned into another arbitrary shape that bespeaks doom and gloom; and the devaluation of human ingenuity.

The Christians meanwhile refashion their Hebrew inheritance and talk not simply of end-time judgement but the return of Jesus who will usher in the new age when everyone knows that old one isn't over yet. One revered colleague has, it seems, fallen into the ancient trap, literalism - the slip-road onto the fundamentalist carriageway. The Christian establishment does itself no good turn, indeed, exposes itself to ridicule and alienates its contemporaries by reciting the speculations of first century Jews who awaited divine deliverance from their Roman conquerors. And no wonder! Go to Rome and stand beneath the triumphal arch built for Titus the Roman Emperor whose victory over the defeat of the Jews in AD70 was brutal and fierce.

Happily, others in this new Christian movement who were most certainly not apocalyptic Jews had a different slant. It would not so much be a catastrophic end to the age but a sane moral reassessment; the sheep and the goats was a neat Rabbinic model for moral behaviour, just as Thomas More - remember him? - rendered the idea in his Utopia lampoon. Service to mankind was the response of man to the suffering of god; it was moral action in relation to the divine image in every other man ...."inasmuch as you did it to one of these the least of my brethren, you did it to me." Sir Thomas had the same compassion - unless of course, you were a heretic!

Yet how hard to cope with infinity; unending time and space - in the past, in the future and into the void! Do not the images of heavenly rest, of sublime unity with God provide consolation and peace? Indeed they do, but as the French sociologist Auguste Comte noted, boundaries belong to the age of myth as does pre-Galileo science stretching back into antiquity that we call religion. Modern science is discovering the divine blue-print of life itself. Thomas More went in search of antiquity and Luther did the same; they each found what they were looking for - the classical arts and humanist sciences. For More, Plato was Moses talking Greek - but without a mountain. For Luther, revelation was private before all else; faith shaped conscience and conscience shaped confessions. It was down to the individual. In one famous scene in Bolt's play, Thomas argues with the Duke of Norfolk and sounds like a protestant: "Will you sacrifice your office for a belief?!" asks Norfolk. "What matters" says More "is not that I believe but that I believe; I trust I make myself obscure." Millennialist sects, Adventists, Pentecostalists, fundamentalists and many evangelical Christians do exactly the same; they create a modern counterpart to the Genesis vision - an end-game of creation that leaves humanity powerless against demonic or divine forces. Useful imagery it might be until it frightens the pants of the unsuspecting, untutored, unparanoid but devoted Christian rank and file who can so easily be bullied into guilt, for not seeing the signs of end, as they know so well, the evidence of the beginning; or so they believe.

So long as we continue to dress mutton up as lamb, so long as we present ancient texts cut from their contextual moorings, we lead the unsuspecting up the garden path, bring the game into disrepute. We expose contemporary credal explorations - religion and science - to ridicule. Above all, such imagery ceases to be poetry, it is no longer art designed to give comfort but a grim, accusative threat to successive generations.

There is a frightening instinct to wrench ancient texts from their natural soil and then replant it in an apocalyptic mulch that waits for the right climate to construct a menu of signals; war, famine, rumours and immorality - the same old clichés dressed up as signs from above. Then comes the call to prepare for the end, the new age at best or the Armageddon at worst. It is quasi-science and gross delusion; it is mis-reading of early radical Jewish end-time schemes in the letters of Paul. By the time John was compiled in the early second century, such ideas were abandoned by other radical Jews. Jesus was not going to return on the clouds; the apocalyptic vision was redundant. We have to carry on and do something to recreate the world and not look at the world through apocalyptic-tinted specs as if the demonic chaos or injustice or suffering is inevitable - all in the hands of God with whom we are of course, in very close touch. The advice from the Oratory cardinal on the street to the Anglican incumbent round the back - one shrine to the other - is simple: "spare no effort in your search for the truth but beware the man who has found it." John Henry Newman. [I quoted it last year but no one heard the punch-line!] More would have got on very well with the famous cardinal but only of course, once he ceased to be an Anglican!

Thomas More's Utopia was - as the Greek word says - is 'no place' but an exploration of what human society should be and what it could be when inspired by revelation with bishop and priest to mediate. Those days are past - we all now have a view; the Reformation and the BBC have seen to that! Man continues his quest to understand even the origins of his understanding. More, scholar and humanist par excellence knew this well but could not part with his medieval scheme; God was in charge and not man.

Today man is in charge and can blow the place sky-high. Most of you will remember the sixties - Ban the Bomb, Bertrand Russell, Kennedy and Kruschev. There really was something apocalyptic in the air, especially around Aldermaston! But it was man who would blow the place up not God. It might destroy humanity as we know it but it would not be the end.

Twenty-first century Christianity sees that the span of time may see everything we know change beyond recognition, say fifty years from now. Now is Genesis, beginning, creation, dreams.

So it has to be the word, the text that provides a boundary between the now and the then. History has not been around for as long as infinity and we need the mythology to confine ourselves, secure our pride of place in eternity and provide comfort when our blip of history ends. The Hebrew scheme of creation and end was so very neat, is so very clever; it puts man's span into a moral and not a scientific framework. It was to comfort, explain and console - not to threaten. For Thomas More, the Christian message threatens only when mankind remains impoverished in this world - unless of course, one is a heretic. Utopia was his preparatory political regime for the heavenly age. We need the boundaries; man creates them and always has. To think otherwise is a madness and that mankind has the ingenuity to do without them is but a utopian dream.

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