Christmas Reflections III - Even angels can learn...

There was stuff going on that first Christmas that was normal and ordinary, and then there was the other stuff. The stuff that was neither normal nor ordinary. We sometimes patronise the characters in the Christmas story as primitives who didn’t know what we know. That’s why they could believe promises that clearly were not believable. So writers like Luke concoct stories that we know can’t be true and therefore are at best mythology, rather than history. The problem is, this isn’t what they claim to be doing, and it’s not how it reads. Luke claims that he is setting out to investigate what happened and then compile an orderly account so that we may have "certainty". And his writing seems to be largely like the reporting of ordinary human responses to extraordinary events. 

Take the characters in Luke 1 blogged about previously. You don’t need to know a lot about the finer points of gynaecology, embryology and development biology to know where babies come from, and what is necessary to make them. And Zechariah and Elisabeth on the one hand, and Mary on the other, were pretty clear on both topics. Zechariah is promised a child, something that he’s wanted for years, and promised it by an impeccable source. As discussed previously, he gets himself into hot water by making it clear he is not convinced, no matter where the information comes from. This is a story that  reads like Bible, not Hollywood. Mary receives disconcerting news in a disconcerting way, and she responds with a question, which prompts a very interesting response that I’ll return to. But first, what might seem like a digression.

A couple of thousand years before the events recorded in Luke Ch1, three men appeared out of the heat haze near Abraham’s camp at a place called Mamre (you’ll find the story in Genesis 18; you’ll find Mamre just to the north of Hebron). One of the “men”, it turns out, was God himself; the other two were probably angels. A conversation ensued with Abraham, while his wife Sarah listened in the background. It’s in this conversation that God promises Abraham that Sarah will have a child, even though (spookily like Zechariah and Elisabeth) Abraham and Sarah were well on the elderly side of old. Sarah chuckles at this promise; after all it’s clearly preposterous. Like New Testament characters, Old Testament characters are not stupid; they know about making babies. God’s response is to challenge Sarah’s lack of belief by posing a question – “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”. And, of course, it turns out that delivering on promises about miracle babies if not too hard, because a child, Isaac, duly appears. This is a story Zechariah would have been familiar with, and this is perhaps one reason why Gabriel is fairly sniffy with him when he doesn’t respond appropriately to a similar promise given to him and Elisabeth. Their child would be miraculous but not unique.

Speaking of Gabriel, I’ve always wondered if he was one of the two angels with God at Mamre. He’s not named of course.  If he was there, this makes his response to Mary’s question intriguing. Because while Mary is clearly willing to accept what he tells her, she also has questions, precisely because, like Sarah, she’s knows where babies come from. Famously, Gabriel tells Mary that something entirely unique is going to happen in her to bring about her pregnancy. But he adds something else. This time it is not a question like the one posed to Abraham. It’s a statement: nothing is impossible with God. Had Gabriel been here before? Had he heard a similar promise, observed a human, and sceptical, reaction to it? Did he hear the question that God responded with? He had certainly seen the promise realised. So perhaps he has learned something. With confidence, confidence borne of experience rather than belief, he’s able to reassure Mary. Possibly.  I’m speculating of course.

The rest, as they say, really is history. Maybe angels can observe, listen, watch and learn. Maybe we should learn from them.

Christmas Reflections II – Rug weaving for beginners

I know nothing about weaving patterned rugs. It’s a pity, because this may be a dying art. They don’t seem to be as popular as they used to be. I blame TV makeover shows that constantly recommend neutral shades and the complete absence of strong patterns. Despite my ignorance, even I know that only one side of the rug carries the pattern. The other side, the underside, is often a visual mess; just lots of strands and flecks here and there. Somehow that visual chaos is exactly what is required to produce the pattern that you see on the other side. I wonder if that’s how it appears to a master rug maker? Maybe they can see a pattern even in the underside mess.

Sometimes life appears to be a bit of mess, at least at the scale most of us necessarily perceive it. When I read about the lives of others, I wonder just how much of the big picture, the pattern, people living their lives are aware of. In the first chapter of his account of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth, Luke weaves together the strands of two particular lives, recounting two particular pre-birth narratives. Why the two stories? There’s very definitely weaving going on as Luke cuts from one story to the other and back again. I think that he does this because he wants us to compare and contrast. The main strands of the two narratives concern an older man, and a young girl. One is famously part of the Christmas story (the young girl), the other is one of Christmas’ forgotten characters, Zechariah.

Zechariah is an interesting pick, particularly at this point in his life. He’s a priest, and a fairly faithful one at that. Luke focuses on a particular occasion, which is probably the high point of Zechariah’s priestly career. It has fallen to him to go in to the temple in Jerusalem and burn incense (symbolically to lead the people’s prayers). Once he has finished his task inside, he will emerge out onto the temple steps, lift his arms and bless all the people who are standing outside, waiting. The point is that he will probably only get to do this once in his career. At this point in Israel’s history, there are lots of priests and not that much to do. So this is his big moment. Exciting as this probably was for him, something extraordinary then happens. As he’s carrying out his duties in the enclosed space of the “Holy Place” in the temple, an angel appears. You might think that this is a fairly common occurrence, but in fact it’s not. As discussed previously, it had been centuries since God had spoken to Israel, and even longer since something like an angel appearing had happened. So this was far from what Zechariah was expecting, and in fact Luke tells us it freaked him out. Once he’s calmed down the angel (who we learn later was Gabriel) gives him good news and better news. A baby is going to be born (and this after Zechariah and his wife Elisabeth had probably given up hope of having children), and the baby is going to grow into someone with a special job to do. This is something Zechariah has been hoping for and praying about. But then it goes a bit pear-shaped.

If this were simple romantic fiction, Zechariah would run home, give Elisabeth the good news and everyone would live happily ever after. But precisely because angels suddenly appearing and saying exactly what you want hear is not an everyday occurrence, it’s all a bit hard to take in. And Zechariah basically tells Gabriel this – not a good idea. He basically asks “How can I believe this?”, indiating a fairly basic lack of a willingness to believe what he’s been told. Because of his lack of belief, poor old Z has to spend the next nine months or so not being able to hear or speak, condemned, as it were, to silence. On the one hand this seems a bit harsh. Yet on the other, it’s symbolic that he’s behaved as Israel has all along. Not believing what God consistently said to them had resulted in silence, as God had warned through the prophet Amos (see Amos 8:11: ‘a famine….of hearing the words of the Lord’). That famine was coming to end, and God was going to do something new. Zechariah, and for that matter his son John, were part of that old story. Something new was about to happen.

Of course, poor old Z’s big day is ruined. His encounter with Gabriel is inside the temple. When he emerges after a delay, with all the people looking to him to bless them, he can’t – he’s got no voice. This particular thread in the pattern then just seems to peter out.

Six months later, the same angel turns up in Nazareth, to speak to one of Elisabeth’s cousins, Mary. There’s obviously a number of contrasts to be drawn between Zechariah and Mary. He was male, she was female, at a time and in a culture where this really mattered. He was a mature, public figure who had carved out his place in society. Mary was a teenager, somewhere between childhood and marriage (she was betrothed – a legal status beyond engagement, but less than marriage), probably not particularly well known beyond her own family. Zechariah was given good news about something he had longed for, hoping against hope. Mary was given disturbing news, with big implications for her and her husband to be. But the real contrast is this. While Zechariah reacted in disbelief, Mary took on board what she was told, and made it clear she was ready to accept it, even although she didn’t understand fully what was going on. Not for the first time, expectations are turned on their head. It’s the educated, professional, religious (proud?) bloke who gets it wrong. It’s the straightforward, if inexperienced but humble girl, that gets it right.

Luke continues to weave the threads. There are two songs, and then two births to come. One birth will be a repeat of another promised child born to a couple who were really too old to have children. It will have its miraculous elements; it will be special, but not unique. The other birth will be a miracle from start to finish, biologically inexplicable, and eternally significant. The characters involved understood some things (like how to make babies), and not others (like how to make particular babies). Z learns to trust what his God tells him, and when he responds properly he will be enabled to sing about “..light to those who sit in darkness..”. Mary, well we know what happens to Mary. 

How much of the big picture, the big pattern, did they understand? Probably not much. But we have the benefit of a master weaver revealing what’s going on. Mind you, even then we struggle to see the pattern at times.

Christmas Reflections I – 1619 and all that…..

The year 1619 was a long time ago. Neither you nor I were around. It is well beyond living memory or even folk memory (if there is such a thing). It is a proper subject for historical research. Thanks to that research there are a number of things that have been recorded for us, and that we can be reasonably sure about. Perhaps most notably, in December 1619 the first Africans arrived as slaves in the Virginia colony, marking the start of North American slavery. The United States of America was not even a glint in anyone’s eye, but we all know what that arrival heralded, and how today it continues to have an influence on many lives. In central Europe, the reformation of the previous century was turning ever more political and the seeds of the “thirty years war” were being sown. Scotland and England had the same king by 1619 (James I/VI), the Tudors having given way to the Stuarts. James was happily propounding the theory of divine right to his son (the future Charles I), thus sowing the seeds of the English civil war. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the population in 1619 lived, worked and died in the countryside. London had a population of about 50 000, and the second city in England was Bristol with a population of about half that size. Obviously there were no smartphones (yes – life is still possible without them). There were also no railways and therefore no common time across the country; the main mode of transport involved feet. There was no industry (at least in the way we think of it today), and books were scarce. Formal education was rudimentary or non-existent for many. Probably fewer than 1 in 5 people could do what you are doing right now (ie reading), and fewer than that could write. It is a world so foreign to us that it might as well be another planet.

Imagine you were told that someone had written something in 1619 that had direct relevance to you in 2019, 400 years later. You could be forgiven for being a tad sceptical. Suppose it was a promise that something amazing would happen, although even in their own time, 400 years ago, the fulfilment of the same promise had already been anticipated for a while. After a further 400 years, you can understand why anticipation might turn to scepticism, then disbelief, and then disappear from general consciousness. How could we even be sure of the detail of something said or written 400 years ago?

I assume that by now you are asking what has 1619 got to do with Christmas?

Consider the opening of the Gospel of Luke which deals with a number of events preceding the first Christmas. Those events, which Luke claims are part of an orderly account of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, mark the continuation of, or arguably the restarting of God speaking directly to humanity after a silence of about 400 years. The Old Testament closes with Malachi, one of the “minor prophets” (called that because of their length, not their importance). Malachi wasn’t the last of the OT books to be written, but his is the last of “thus says the Lord” books. At the end of the OT Israel returned from exile much diminished. Jerusalem was re-established, the temple rebuilt and there was a “revival” of sorts. But it all somehow seems very low key; not like the “old days”. Malachi promises that God isn’t finished with either Israel, or the rest of us. A messenger will come to make preparations, and then the “Lord …will suddenly come to his temple”. And then ….. nothing. Hundreds of years of nothing. No messenger, no Lord, nothing.

History of course didn’t stop with Malachi. It wound remorselessly on. Some of it was good; much of it was bad (at least in Israel’s neck of the woods). They were ruled by Persians, they were ruled by Egyptians (or at least the Greek version of Egyptians), they were ruled by Syrians. They rebelled, were oppressed, rebelled again. Then they were incorporated into the Roman empire. All the time, it was as though their God had stopped speaking to them. 400 years of silence. The events recorded in the Old Testament became ever more remote. Abraham, Moses, Joshua and David had formed their history. But they became almost mythical (no doubt there were those who claimed exactly that). The likes of Ezra, Nehemiah, and yes Malachi, gradually shifted from memory, to history to ….legend? Myth? Certainly little more than words in a book. Gradually the book gathered dust. It was translated, reinterpreted, argued over. Did the words in the book matter? Perhaps it all seemed a bit esoteric. The sort of stuff to be left to the academics and scholars, historians and religious professionals. But then, just while everyone was quietly forgetting all that God had said and done through thousands of years of their history, things began to stir again. But quite obscurely at first.

To the average Jewish person around the time of Jesus birth, the promises of Malachi probably seemed as remote and irrelevant as things said in 1619 seem to us. That is, very remote and very irrelevant. So irrelevant in fact, that even quite educated people didn’t know about them. But it turns out that what is recorded in the OT is not myth and legend, and that a promise is a promise. God doesn’t make promises lightly, and once made they are kept. So, after 400 years, Luke records that messengers arrive, announcements are made, prompts and signs are provided. It is true that much of this would be missed by many then and now. But events would begin to unfold that would be hard to miss. Thanks to the likes of Luke (other Gospel accounts are available), who would compile an orderly record, neither those events or their meaning need be lost on us, 2000 years further on. They remain worth reflecting on.

What’s all this about more debate?

Here’s where my “remain” friends (and most of my friends voted remain) and me probably part company. I suspect most of them have been spluttering over their cornflakes and muttering darkly at TV news bulletins of late, because of the latest shenanigans at Westminster. And I understand why. They voted remain in the EU referendum (as did I) because they thought it was right and sensible. Probably, like me, they did not vote remain because the EU filled them with unalloyed joy (discussed further here). It’s a human institution with all the faults and flaws of any human institution (and a few extra ones to boot). But it made political sense to stay in, on the basis that many of the problems we face don’t respect borders and are better tackled as part of a larger political block. It made economic sense because the states of the EU form our largest and nearest market. Indeed the single market is as much a British construction as it is a European one. I could go on. But I won’t (at least not about all the reasons for voting remain). Leaving, they genuinely believed then and now, was and is madness. Leaving with “no deal” they regard as tantamount to national self-harm on an epic scale. I’m not sure I would put it that strongly. Time will, unfortunately, probably tell.

Their anger over Boris’ latest wheeze is genuine too. I have no reason to believe anything else. They see him as using illegitimate (if not strictly illegal) tactics to thwart the attempts of his Brexit opponents to scupper a “no deal” Brexit. Some, I have no doubt, think that the proroguing of Parliament is antidemocratic because it will deny the people’s representatives the opportunity to scrutinise the intentions and actions of the Executive. And with some justification they will point out that during the recent Conservative election campaign, Boris and a number of his current cabinet colleagues, sought to pacify moderate elements in the Conservative selectorate and garner votes by implying that they would not do what they have essentially just done. These various views are shared by a very large number of people. Last time I looked, well over 1.6M had signed a petition against proroguing Parliament. Polls suggest that there is currently a majority of that view by some margin. And there have been protests in many UK towns and cities.

As far as the proroguing issue goes, here’s my problem with those who have a problem. Their basic case seems to be that this is a manoeuvre to deny Parliament the opportunity to debate the issues around leaving the EU, particularly those raised by leaving without an agreement – the no deal scenario. But exactly what is there to debate that hasn’t been fully aired over the last three years? Who is there left in Parliament (or the country for that matter) that lacks the information required to form a view? The result of the referendum itself and how it should be responded to has been discussed to death. Early on the idea was floated that Parliament should simply refuse to act on what technically was an advisory vote. This was rejected. The overwhelming majority were clear that the result had to be honoured. Most MPs in 2016, and in the post 2017 House of Commons voted remain, and a minority of them have never reconciled themselves to the idea of leaving the EU. This I understand. But then, why did they vote 6-to-1 to put what was a complex and nuanced decision to the people in a binary referendum in the first place? Yes, David Cameron pushed the issue of a referendum for relatively selfish political and party management reasons. But he was aided and abetted by the political class as a whole, Labour, Liberal Democrats and the Greens and others. They all abrogated their responsibilities are all guilty for the resulting chaos.The historians can argue about how the guilt should be precisely divided up when the dust has settled.

Post referendum, and post Cameron, we had a general election. There were pro-EU membership/anti-Brexit options on the ballot paper in the form of the Liberal Democrats, Greens and occasional others. But these were decisively rejected. We saw the return (although perhaps temporarily) of two-party politics.  Of those two main parties, both made clear they would seek a negotiated withdrawal from the EU, so honouring the referendum result. Labour went further. They were specific in their rejection of no-deal, and said they would reject it as an option if they formed the government. The election was a close run thing, but Labour didn’t form the government because the Conservatives got more votes (although a relatively small win in terms of votes cast was then magnified by parliamentary arithmetic). But the options were there.

It is the no deal issue that has galvanised many of my remain friends, petition signers, press and politicians on all sides. It is presumably no deal, so the argument goes, that won’t be scrutinised and debated if Boris gets away with prorogation. But hang on, specifically this issue has been the subject of debate for months. It has been voted on in the Commons. Parliamentary skulduggery has even been resorted to by the opponents of no deal, with active support from the Speaker of the Commons. It’s not just Boris and his acolytes who can dive through gaps in our unwritten constitution. The debate has produced more heat than light and precious little agreement. Some insist that no deal will be an unmitigated disaster, others see it as the ideal clean break with the EU. Most are probably somewhere between these extremes. But the notion that it has not been debated, or that further debate is going to make any difference is not sustainable.

I have no idea precisely what the effect of a no deal Brexit will be. I am sure that there will be disruption. There will be costs. I don’t really see where there will be benefits. Will it be a disaster on the scale of war or famine or plague? Probably (hopefully) not. But this was always one of the possible ways of exiting the EU. It was also always one of the potential outcomes of the Article 50 process that Parliament voted, overwhelmingly, to trigger. In the referendum campaign, we were warned about the potential hit to the economy and jobs if we decided to leave. I found the warnings plausible, many did not. Some may or may not have been persuaded by the fantasy promises of the various out campaigns. But with all of that ringing in our ears a majority of my fellow citizens voted to leave the EU. We’ve now had three further years of debate. There’s no evidence of mass buyer’s remorse or that another referendum would produce a very different result, although conceivably it might produce a different outcome. But that would hardly help settle things. If it was remain 52% vs leave 48% (not entirely implausible if the polls are to be believed), why should that result be allowed to stand when the first one was reversed? Parliament ducked its obligations and handed the decision to the people. The people took the decision. The debate has been had. The democratic thing to do is implement the decision. It will be messy. But if democracy means anything is it surely that we get what we (or at least the majority) vote for.

But one final note. Recently I’ve been thinking about the life and times of a character in the Bible called Jonah. He lived in turbulent times. His own nation had been on the up, and under the current regime things seemed to be going well. It looked like the King (Jeroboam II) was doing well, militarily, politically and economically. I bet the King Jeroboam thought so. But it turned out there was a whole other level of reality that the King, and many people of the day in Israel, were missing. Their success was far more to do with providential timing and God moving the pieces on the international chess board, than Jeroboam's genius. He was working His larger purposes out. We know this because it’s helpfully recorded in 2 Kings 14:23-27, and explained further in the books of Jonah, Amos and Hosea. We live in turbulent times, nationally and internationally. This is not all and only about us, votes, debates, protest, politics and tactics. Providence may be merciful to us, and may come through these present difficulties unscathed. It might not. But the likes of Jonah, Amos and Hosea have a lot to say to us today. About the humility required of leaders if nothing else. Their own people, in their own time, did not listen to them. Perhaps we are in danger of making the same mistake.

Don't ask me how I'm feeling

Full disclosure – I’m a Scot. We have a reputation for being a dour, miserable lot. Some argue that this explains why we took to Calvinism so enthusiastically. Mind you, proving the direction of the causality (were we Calvinists because we were dour, or dour because we were Calvinists?) is probably impossible. This is all a bit unfair to both Scots and Calvinists. However, as it is emotion I'm about to discuss, I thought I had better point out I might be accused of having a problem with it!

In contemporary culture, emotion is important. We’re told to read it, explore it, own it, express it. Not to do these things is to be repressed. We don’t just need intelligence, we need emotional intelligence. How I feel is what really matters, and trumps almost everything else. Even in science, those interested in cold cognition are increasingly interested in emotion (or its proxies). How we feel is as cool a subject of study as how we think. Not all emotion is good of course. There are good and bad emotions, and the aim of modern life is to maximise the good and minimise the bad. Happiness good, sadness bad. Guilt bad, the satisfaction that flows from being self-justified, good. The “right sort” of emotional state is an objective for life. It’s healthy to pursue feeling good.

So it might be argued that it is just as well that there are churches that seem to focus on meeting this need to feel good. A recent article on the BBC website (“Hillsong: A church with rock concerts and 2m followers”; 13^th August) left me feeling that I needed to think about emotion. It ended with a quote from a young man who, for various reasons, had left Hillsong. He clearly still felt warmly towards. He was quoted as saying: 

“The music is so beautiful and uplifting and it makes you feel better. I don't think there's anything in the Bible that says we can't feel good.”

If you’ve never heard of Hillsong, it’s worth knowing that it is a rapidly growing group of churches, originating in Australia. It is perhaps best known for its music, and it has given to the church at large songs that are probably now sung somewhere every Sunday (you’ll find lots of examples on YouTube). The music and vibe attracts a mainly young audience to its large weekly gatherings, with stadium-sized conferences running more occasionally. Hillsong’s weekly live audience runs into the hundreds of thousands (if not millions), with many more watching and listening online.

The thing about music, particularly well written and well played music, is that it is a brilliant way to induce a mood, evoke an emotion, create an atmosphere. And I don’t have any problem with that. I like music, of all sorts (and play music of some sorts). It’s clearly important in church too. Christians have always sung together, taking much of their early material from the Psalms in the Old Testament, Psalms which themselves had been sung for millennia by Israel. Some of this singing is sad and poignant. But much of it is joyful and uplifting. Indeed this upbeat note is probably where the balance lies. After all, the instruction in Psalm 100 v 1 is to make a joyful noise, not a mournful one. And in the New Testament the instruction is to sing out of thankfulness; I’m assuming that this means it will be will be on the up side rather than the down. And I don't really see a problem if this really does help us feel better. So in one sense Hillsong aren’t really innovators in giving church music a key, upbeat role. But here is my problem: don’t we need something beyond feeling better, feeling good? 

Singing, particularly singing together, is powerful. But powerful enough? Maybe it would be a good idea to know why  we’re singing, and to know why we're singing what you're singing. Singing, and the feel-good factor that it can engender, doesn’t ever seem to be the primary objective in Scripture. There is nothing in the Bible that says we can't feel good. But there's lots in the Bible that suggest there are things that need attention before we get to feel good. Maybe if simply feeling good is our objective, we're missing something important. Because when singing to feel good becomes the objective, the song is all that there is. Maybe that's when the song becomes hollowed out, and becomes less than it could be. 

Something else of interest recently happened, this time among the ranks of Hillsong musicians. One of their more accomplished writers and performers decided that Christianity just may not cut it for him anymore. Posting on Instagram (since removed, but picked up by others), among other things he wrote:

“This is a soapbox moment so here I go … How many preachers fall? Many. No one talks about it. How many miracles happen. Not many. No one talks about it. Why is the Bible full of contradictions? No one talks about it. How can God be love yet send four billion people to a place, all ‘coz they don’t believe? No one talks about it. Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet—they can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people. But it’s not for me.” (quoted more extensively  here)

There’s a familiarity about this; these are issues that have been, and are, discussed, widely. They are questions that have answers. The fallibility of Christian leaders is well known and often reported (sometimes gleefully); there are websites and blogs dedicated to it. But then who was he following, or being encouraged to follow? We’re all fallible, and we all fail. That’s why the Gospel focuses not on a man, but on Jesus (who while a man, was also God). The role and reality (or otherwise) of the miraculous is another often talked about subject (some Christians seem to talk about nothing else). But miracles in the Bible, are relatively rare and usually serve a particular purpose. And that purpose is rarely evidential. Contradictions? While the claim is often made that the Bible is "full" of them, it has consistently failed to stand up to scrutiny.  The problem of suffering is a key, important and difficult issue for many, but hardly a new one. He also says: "Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion.” I admit I’m not entirely sure what this even means. But a cursory read of this blog (and much more besides) will show that science is no competitor to faith, at least not the kind of faith the Bible talks about. So what’s going on?

Could it be a simple as this: if the music’s all you’ve got, then when the music stops you’re in big trouble. If all you have is a good feeling, an uplifted mood, based on feel-good songs, this will be a  fragile and temporary state of affairs. It will not be enough to effect a fundamental change in life-direction; it will not stand the test of time, nor stand up to a skeptical and hostile culture. Maybe, after all, life is not primarily about how we feel. It has to come back to what we know. It is true that the philosophically sophisticated puritan theologian Johnathan Edwards said: “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections". But the same Psalmist who tells us to make a joyful noise, immediately sings: “Know that the Lord, he is God” (Ps 100:3). Scripture doesn't make the sort of rigid distinction between feeling and knowing that we have tended to in Western culture. Throughout Scripture knowing and feeling are linked and are not two rigid and separate categories. So all knowing and no feeling is no great improvement on all feeling and no knowing.

But it does seem to be clear that feeling (and singing) need a proper foundation. They need to spring from right knowing. To focus only on how we feel is to focus on the wrong thing, to have things the wrong way round. If we make how we feel our primary objective, we short-change ourselves. So, as Alistair Begg said once, “Don’task me how I feel, ask me what I know”. He, incidentally, is also a Scot.

What an odd thing to do on a Saturday night…

Here I was sitting in a tent on a Saturday night. Perhaps in and of itself not that odd I’ll grant. But it was a rather large tent, holding about two-thousand people. Fair enough, not unknown in the summer, even in the UK. After all, there seem to be more and more festivals popping up all the time, many of them involving tents.  But here we were on the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century, thinking about words written in the first century; seeing in those words something of relevance to the present day (and indeed the future). Nor was this a gathering of crusty old enthusiasts, a wistful looking back by a bunch of old hobbyists to a bygone and much missed era. No, this was about now. Finding in those words direction for living now, with an orientation towards an event yet to come. Much about this is really quite odd in today’s terms.

The event was of course the first evening session of the middle week of the Keswick Convention. Since 1875, Christians from a variety of denominational backgrounds have met in Keswick to hear Bible teaching. The speakers too have always been drawn from a range of backgrounds. However, at its heart has been the conviction that the Living God speaks through a book (the Bible), and so the “Bible Readings” (daily Bible-based talks often covering a single book or section of the Bible) are one of the main aspects of the convention.

Even among Bible-believing Christians, Keswick has not been without its critics. In the early days, in the late 19^th Century, it was treated with suspicion by some evangelical leaders. More recently criticism has come from the “reformed” end of the evangelical spectrum (eg see this from Kevin DeYoung). Much of this will seem overblown to your average convention goer today, who is happy to listen to a range of Bible teachers who take Scripture seriously and want to explain it simply. What’s odd is that this is still going on at all.

The culture around us is in a state of continual flux. Different movements and ideas wax and wane. On one reading of history, Christianity has been in terminal decline, at least in Western Europe, for a while. That of course was part of the great modernist project. Religion in general, and Christianity in particular belonged to humanity’s adolescence. With the arrival of the enlightenment and the achievements of science, it was time to grow up and move on. Poor modernism. It’s death was declared by the post-modernists. Then it transpired that postmodernism was a bit of a dead end, and it went into decline. In the religious sphere there was the rise of the “new” atheists. But even their demise has been announced (although they may be unaware of this).  

I first came to Keswick when I was a student. Back in 1985 (34 years ago!) a bunch of us were here when Eric Alexander taught at the Bible readings on 1 Corinthians (I still have the book somewhere). I was back last year to hear Chris Wright on Micah. In the world I grew up in as a student, Christians in general were to be tolerated, and the Bible-believing fundamentalist sort were to be pitied. But thousands of the latter type gathered at Keswick every summer. The culture in the UK has moved on. Those pesky fundamentalists are still around, but now they have to be kept out of the public square, or maligned in the cyberworld, because of their dangerous multiphobic views. But here we were in Lake District, in July, listening in a tent, on a Saturday night, to prescient warnings about such circumstances, written originally by a guy called Peter in the first century.   

This would all strike the average person as odd if it struck them at all. After all,unless you knew about the Keswick convention, you wouldn’t know about it! But think about it. The Bible is a book that has been maligned, slandered, criticised, censored, banned, misinterpreted, mistranslated and mishandled for as long as it has been around. Yet, somehow, it remains potent. I suppose you could try to make the same observation about the Quran (although it’s a relatively youthful 1400 years old) or the Communist Manifesto (somewhat out of fashion currently). And there are other books and scriptures that have their adherents. I don’t find those alternatives persuasive. I do find the Bible persuasive. It presents a coherent account properly understood of the God who is there, of His rescue mission to and for humanity, and of the demands He has on my life now. In my own local Church (Bridge Chapel in South Liverpool), its message struck a couple of individuals last Sunday with such force and vitality that the direction of their lives has been altered. They are different to me, with different backgrounds and personalities, yet somehow the message of the Bible spoke to them the same way it speaks to me. And now we now share in the same central relationship, and the same living hope that here in Keswick we were considering last night, from the first letter of Peter to a bunch of first century, first generation Christians, that he called exiles.

The people Peter wrote to were seen as odd. In their own day some called them “evildoers” (1 Pet 2:12) and they were slandered (1 Pet 3:16) and maligned (1 Pet 4:4). In contemporary non-Christian and anti-Christian writings, they were called everything from cannibals to subversives to atheists! You’ll find examples of similar things (and worse) in the Twittersphere and on the interweb. Perhaps soon we'll find the same types of charges being made against us in the non-virtual, non-cyber world. But then Jesus was seen as odd, very odd. I’m happy to share that oddness, and was happy to think about it last night in a tent at Keswick. 

Which is, when you think about it, a bit odd. 

Unless it isn’t.  

Cold fusion and hot money

It turns out that we’ve just passed the 30^th anniversary of the announcement of the most revolutionary of scientific discoveries. On 23^rd March, 1989 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons held a press conference (you can still see it on YouTube) and told the world that they had found a relatively simple way of producing nuclear fusion, the process that fuels stars and very large explosions. Decades and tens of billions of dollars had been spent on finding a way of doing this on earth in a controlled way in order to generate clean energy at minimal cost (the irony!). Fleischmann and Pons (who for brevity I’ll call F & P), claimed they could do it in a test tube with some fancy electrodes, an electric current and water. The process was called “cold fusion” and the reason you’ve probably never have heard of it is, of course, that it quickly turned out that they hadn’t discovered anything of the sort.

It’s hard to overstate the potential implications of their “discovery”. Abundant, cheap, clean energy – imagine the impact that would have had on climate change and the carbon crisis. And it didn’t take long for the notion that cold fusion might have military and strategic applications to start exercising the minds of governments across the globe. In the US, where the announcement was made (F & P conducted their experiments at the university of Utah, where Pons was chairman of the Chemistry department) the Department of Energy went into overdrive.  It ordered its labs to find out if the claims were true, diverting teams of scientists from their own projects. Weekly meetings were convened and reports sent to Washington to the Secretary for Energy. Eventually the President was briefed. This was serious stuff.

The scientific community at large was desperate for details of F & P’s experiment. At the time of their press conference they hadn’t published any of their results, although they had submitted a paper to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. The Editor understood well the potential importance of their results and fast-tracked the paper through the peer review process. However, when it was published it was relatively short, lacked detail and contained a number of errors. A paper that was submitted to Nature was withdrawn. Very quickly it began to emerge that the initial claims were wrong, the result not so much of fraud or mendacity, but sloppy science, lack of precision and over interpretation. The following year a paper was published reporting results obtained using exactly the same equipment as in the original experiment – no evidence of cold fusion was found. And there you might have though the story would have ended. Interesting to historians or science, but really just a footnote that the rest of us could forget. But then there is the money.

Money, it turns out, is involved in this story from the beginning. The University of Utah quickly had its patent lawyers on the case, and quickly devoted $5M to support cold fusion research. It also lobbied the US Government for tens of millions more dollars for the research (an effort that was unsuccessful). Industry, private equity and philanthropy got involved. By 1992 F & P were in France working with a Toyota subsidiary, an effort that eventually burned through $12M dollars and ended in 1998. Well after mainstream science had moved on, pockets of researchers in both government and private labs continued to beaver away at cold fusion (and still do). There has been no fusion success, although it’s arguable that there might have been some useful spin-offs.

The money kept flowing. Google, no less, spent another $10M on cold fusion research, between 2015 and 2019, announcing only just last week the end of its efforts  (see this commentary in Nature).  It was reported in the Financial Times that a company in North Carolina, founded by a businessman with a background in brickmaking, had attracted upwards of $100M  to develop, you’ve guessed it, cold fusion (although these days it tends to be called “low-energy nuclear reactions”).  Money came from a range of funds and groups. It’s genuinely difficult to tell the grifters from the marks, who are the dupes and who are the gamblers. Somebody appears to making a living (if not useful quantities of electricity) out of the remains of F & P’s ideas.

It turns out that real scientific revolutions are scarce. And they are often only recognised long after the revolution has occurred. Scientific revolutions that have big practical impacts on society, that lead to radical transformations in what and how we do things are even rarer, and usually come from long years of hard slog rather than eureka moments. It’s said of financial advertising that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. The same is true of scientific claims, particularly those made in press conferences. But it would appear there are gullible people out there, and some of them are minted.

Scientists are human (yes it’s true!) and like most humans we are not immune to influences from outside the lab, from journalists, university administrators, patent lawyers, governments, investors et al. The priority of journalists (for whose benefit press conferences are run), particularly those who have a poor understanding of science, is to simplify and categorise information in the best way get their efforts into news bulletins or prominent pages in the publications they write for. It’s not that they are uninterested in accuracy and precision just that it’s not at the top of their priority list. So we should withstand the temptation of the quick, easy, simple story, and wait for the boring slog of control experiments, confirmation and replication. With cold fusion that’s what happened, and quite quickly. Just not quickly enough for F & P.

While not entirely victims, I do feel a tad of sympathy for F & P. They took the heat (if you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors) that others, who were probably more deserving, escaped. They were the focus of that now infamous press conference. We all marched to the top of the hill with them, before tumbling down the other side. But they then got steamrollered. Many of us, placed under the pressure they found themselves under, might have made some of the poor choices they made. The warning of Proverbs 14:12 comes to mind.  

Frankly Franklin……

There is a (largely) unspoken rule that insists there are two topics of conversation that are inappropriate for polite after-dinner conversation – politics and religion. This is a rule I struggle with although it is not a big problem for me because I don’t get invited to many polite English dinner parties. The problem with this rule is that politics and religion are two of the more interesting topics worth having a conversation about. They are more interesting than those other staples – the weather and association football (or soccer as it is occasionally called). I suppose the rule developed because discussing religion and politics can be tricky. At the moment in the UK most political discussion begins and ends with Brexit, which shows no signs of being resolved any time soon. Its resolution certainly hasn’t been brought any closer by the election that should never have been. And there are lots of aspects of religion that are not worth discussing around a dinner table or anywhere else. But this weekend politics and religion have intersected in a way that has me bamboozled.

Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, has called a day of prayer for tomorrow (Sunday 2^nd June) in support of that other president, Donald J. Trump (President of the United States). One hand this is perfectly understandable. As he (Franklin that is) fairly points out, praying for those in authority is something that Scripture encourages every Christian to do. So I believe that I should be praying for political leaders, both in the UK (how they need it!), and others including President Trump. What’s got me confused is what Franklin is encouraging us to pray for.

On the BGEA web page with this “call”, the invitation is to pray “that God would protect, strengthen, embolden, and direct” President Trump. Protect I get. The US president is a target regardless of who he is and what his policies are. Strengthen I get – he’s an old guy and it’s a tough job. And he certainly needs direction. But embolden? This suggests that Franklin thinks Trump is doing a fine job and going in the right direction. He needs encouragement to press on with the good work he’s started. This I don’t get. Trump’s campaign back in 2016 was marked from the outset by insults and deception. It was devoid of almost any kind of virtue, let alone Christian virtue. It was fairly clear that here was going to be a President who had, at best, a distant relationship with truth, and no understanding of (or apparent need for) humility. The “Access Holywood” tape and the abuse of John McCain should, along with other things, have made him all but unelectable. And what was hinted at in the campaign has been writ large during his presidency. None of which has anything to do with me. But here’s what I really don’t understand.

US evangelicals (an admittedly elastic term) were among Trump’s staunchest supporters and it is claimed they have largely stuck by him. US evangelical leaders (or at least a prominent proportion of them) have given him public and vocal support. For someone whose lifestyle, ambitions and pronouncements are so starkly different to what Scripture teaches they should be, this support is baffling. I know that elections are about choices and the alternative was unpalatable to many evangelicals. Among other things Hillary was also perceived to have a problem with truth.  There were Congressional hearings and FBI investigations, and accusations flying thick and fast. But just on the narrow ground of telling the truth, did Hillary really have as big a problem as Trump? In any case, if they were both so equally appalling, that’s an argument for spoiling your ballot.

I understand too that a major motivation for US evangelicals was a desire to see someone in the White House who would, in time, deliver a more conservative Supreme Court. This, so the argument goes, would provide a longer term means for preventing the slide away from supposed Biblical values. To an extent this has paid off. Trump has delivered for them, wiping out the “liberal” majority on the Court (although it remains to be seen whether this will really deliver the longer term, longed for “benefits”). My problem with this is that the US Supreme Court and the US culture wars just don’t feature in Scripture. Pride, adultery, lying all do. Being aligned with the latter to achieve the former doesn’t square with any kind of Biblically-based reasoning. Even if you thought Donald was worth taking a punt on back in 2016, how can the chaos, the dissembling, the continuing ad-hominem attacks, the coarsening of debate, the sheer incompetence, not prompt a rethink?

But Franklin does not appear to be concerned by any of this. He is not suggesting that his constituency prays for Donald’s repentance or his humbling. Neither is he asking for prayer that the political process as a whole might function better to deliver real benefits to the people. Instead, he talks about Trump’s enemies trying to destroy him. Now if by destroy we’re talking about violent or disorderly activity to overturn a lawfully elected government, going about its lawful business (although this is being argued about in multiple US courts), then this should be prayed against and resisted. Fair enough.  But presumably the enemies Franklin has in mind are Trumps political opponents. And all they seem to be doing at the moment is trying, by constitutional and lawful means, to get to the bottom of who Trump really is and what he’s been up to. Of course politics can be a dirty business. Ironically Trump was elected in part to “drain the swamp”. How has that turned out? Michael “lock her up” Flynn a convicted felon, 34 indictments or guilty pleas emerging from the now-complete Muller investigation (so much for it being a hoax), multiple administration members caught out in financial and ethics violations. Despite the desire to lock up Hillary, after investigations, reported referrals and Fox News wishful thinking, there’s been little in the way of indictments let alone convictions.

Perhaps the enemies Franklin has in mind are those who lurk in the US media who refuse to give the President a fair shake. This too is difficult to understand given the way Trump and his associates have sought to systematically malign and undermine all but the most supportive media. And the White House media operation, headed a press secretary who should know better, has consistently demonstrated the same problems with truth as their boss, as most recently highlighted in the Muller report. So what about praying for honest reporting (on all sides) and rigorous fact checking so there might be something akin informed debate based on reasonably well established and agreed facts (if such a thing is possible)?

Frankly, Franklin, you’re calling on Christians to do something most us are doing anyway (and more fervently than we have for a while given the state of politics on both sides of the Atlantic). It’s the terms of your “call” that has me confused. You seem to be taking a partisan position. I’m not arguing that Christians should not be involved in politics, although as Tim Farron’s experience recently demonstrated it’s difficult. There are lots of issues where there is plenty of scope for Christians to take different positions, many of which are political. On this side of the pond you’ll find Christians (in the Biblical as opposed to cultural sense) in different political parties arguing for mutually contradictory policies. But there’s something about Trump that is beyond politics. Given the monumental deceit, lies, attacks, misogyny, racism and dangerous incompetence at home (“healthcare – who knew it was so hard?”) and abroad (“I have a great relationship with Chairman Kim”) it’s not Donald Trump enemies that are the problem. We should pray for the man. But frankly, Franklin, you need to rethink what it is exactly we should be praying.

The election that never should have been

I’ve just been to vote. That isn’t a strange occurrence in a Western democracy of course (notwithstanding frequently appalling turnout figures).  But this was an election I should never have had the opportunity to participate in. Over the next few days, all over the European Union, about 400 million people will have the opportunity to vote for the EU parliament. But I took part in another vote back in 2016, and the outcome of that vote (the EU membership referendum in the UK) meant that I should no longer be a citizen of the EU and entitled to vote in its parliamentary election.

For what it’s worth, in the referendum I held my nose and voted to remain in the EU. I held my nose because there’s a lot not to like about the EU. It could be argued that it is both a corrupt and corrupting organisation. Its own auditors frequently have a problem with its accounts, and have been consistently critical of both central EU institutions and member states. EU civil servants and MEPs seem to be on a gravy train that is opaque to public scrutiny and immune to criticism. And an insulated, self perpetuating elite seem to perpetually benefit, while all over the continent all sorts of people struggle to obtain life’s necessities. It is great at coming up with rules big and small, but equally capable of bending or breaking them when it suits. Although it should be all for one and one for all, the big states often seem to bully the small states, the North exploits the South, the East bridles under the strictures of the West, the French want to be in charge, and Luxembourg is. I get all this. 

But, many of these criticisms can be levelled at the bureaucracies and politicians in the member states as well. And on the other side of the ledger the EU has provided a forum for wide European debate about pressing issues that is far superior to the way we used to settle arguments in this part of the world. Many of these issues, like climate change or migration, or Trump or China, are much better handled by Europe acting in concert. The EU has brought real economic, educational and social benefits to many European states which might have been much the weaker without them (with consequences for us in the UK). It has brought direct economic and social benefits to the UK, sometimes in the teeth of UK Government resentment and opposition (just look at Glasgow’s experience during the 1980’s). By and large we’ve consistently punched above our weight within EU institutions, and at least in financial terms have got more out than we put in – particularly in science, technology and education. The UK pushed for the single market and radical expansion of the EEC which became the EU, having a major influence on the direction it took to get to where it is today. Finally, at the time of the referendum what weighed heaviest with me were the economic consequences of withdrawal. I confess the importance of the common external tariff passed me by, but I heard and understood the warnings about the consequences of being cut off from membership of the EU single market. I always reckoned the land border on the island of Ireland would be a problem. So I voted to remain.

And I was on the losing side.

I wasn’t on the losing side because all those who voted leave were stupid or lazy. I wasn’t on the losing side because a majority of my fellow citizens were seriously misled. I was on the losing side because for a whole complex of reasons,  that it is pointless now to psychoanalyse,  more people voted to leave than remain – simple as. And now we all have to live with the consequences. I think a lot of them will be bad consequences. But what kind of democracy do we have if some small group gets to decide when we have to be protected from ourselves?

We have a representative democracy where these issues should have been settled in our representative institutions, primarily in the House of Commons. The issues are complex, and needed to be debated and thought through in a way that was never going to happen in a binary referendum campaign. But the political class, whether because of lack of courage, or sense, or just political morality, bottled it, and abrogated their responsibility. They gave us a binary choice, and we chose. I might not like the choice, but that’s life, and that’s democracy. Or at least it should have been.

For complex reasons, the politicians then compounded their folly by conniving to subvert the choice made in the referendum. There’s not really much to choose between the hard brexiteers and the remoaners, and all the other splinter groups that have emerged. Giving us another choice will not atone for their guilt. In fact, we did have a subsequent choice in a general election, when by an overwhelming majority people did not vote for those saying the referendum result should be ignored. That choice was an option on the ballot, and very few opted for it. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and it’s genuinely difficult to see any way forward, let alone one which is attractive. So we’re stuck. And because we’re stuck in the EU, I had to go and vote this evening.

It wasn’t difficult, and it wasn’t dangerous. I didn’t have to join a long queue in baking heat and wait for hours. I don’t have any doubt that my vote will be counted (although whether it counts is another matter). Things were well organised, free and fair. It was a warm spring evening, and the staff at the polling station were polite and quietly competent as they went about their business. These are all things to be grateful for. I’m glad that once again I got to do it. But I really shouldn’t have had to.