Christmas 2020 (II): It was grim………

I’ve always struggled with “Christmas”. Don’t get me wrong, I can indulge in as much chocolate as the next man (more if it is Dairy Milk – apologies for the shameless plug). I enjoy the time off work, particularly after the last nine months of sitting in front of a laptop screen. It was nice to see the dinning room table revert to being a dining table on Christmas day. I do like the opportunity to get together with family and friends, although it is obviously somewhat restricted in current circumstances. But there is no necessary connection between any of these things and the most amazing event ever to occur in the history of this planet, not to say the universe. A big claim. But is seems bigger than it is because it is entirely subverted by what “Christmas” has become. Of course, this suits the culture at large. To my fellow strugglers I want to say that, on reflection, much of what occurred at and around that “first Christmas” is entirely appropriately remembered, meditated on and savoured this Christmas.

It was a short video by N.T. Wright that reminded me that the first Christmas emerges from “a very dark time when everything was pretty miserable”. So if you feel that things are grim now (and the pandemic hasn’t gone away), the true Christmas story, as opposed to the shallow jollity of the popular version, comes as a relief. It is fairly grim too. It is the story of the arrival of a young Jewish couple in the town of Bethlehem almost 2000 years ago. It should have been a happy time for them. Betrothal should have led to a happy marriage, soon followed by the birth of their first child. In that culture at that time, these twin events should have filled both them and their extended family with joy and excitement. And the  context would have enhanced this. The young woman concerned, Mary, had an older cousin named Elisabeth. Even although Elisabeth was well past having children, she had just produced a son. Everyone was cock-a-hoop. In fact the whole thing had caused quite a stir. There was talk of angels, miracles and prophecies and all sorts of things, but facts is facts, and Elisabeth and Zechariah were now parents. But for Mary and her intended (let’s call him Joe) life had become a tad complicated. And not in a good way.

Mary, although only engaged, was found to be pregnant. This was found, as opposed to announced, because Joe was not the father. A scandal was brewing and it was clear what should happen. Joe, for the sake of his own reputation should divorce her, and make a big thing of it. After all, by definition he wasn’t to blame for the situation. To make matters worse from the point of view of many observers, Mary went on about angels and not being pregnant because of any man. You can imagine the sneers. For cousin Elisabeth to talk in this way was bad enough, but at least she and her husband Zechariah were clear that the baby was theirs. For Mary to try and piggyback on this good news was just bad form. Everyone knew fine and well how babies were made. But Mary apparently stuck to her story, and then to cap it all, poor old gullible Joe had started talking about dreams and angels. Again, you can imagine the looks and sneers. You don’t need too much of an imagination to understand the pressure and unpleasantness all this likely caused. In our day and culture it would be bad enough. But in Mary and Joe’s time, grim would hardly cover it.

To social and psychological pressure was then added considerable physical discomfort. With Mary heavily pregnant, they had to travel from Mary’s home in Nazareth, south to Bethlehem. This was a journey of about 70 miles, that would take at least 4 days. While they didn't exactly travel under duress, it was in response to a legal edict. Neither the destination nor the timing were of their own choosing. It was an arduous journey by modern standards, uncomfortable and even dangerous. As well as the constant fear of miscarriage, they were travelling under a cloud of scandal, probably in a caravan with people who knew (and therefore could spread) the “story”. There was a far from warm welcome awaiting them. After all, do you suppose anyone really bought stories of angels and virgin births? Grim. And then there was a birth. The physical circumstances are unknown to us. We don’t know who attended Mary, we don’t know if Joe watched or helped (what was really going through his mind?). We do know that all that was available to put the new baby in was a feeding trough! Hardly an auspicious start. And from there things had a distinctly up and down feel.

Yes it is true that there was a visit from a group of strange, sweaty, but largely respectful shepherds not long after the birth. But, with all due respect, we’re hardly talking royal visit. And neither Joe nor Mary really knew what to make of them. They too had some story of angels, apparently lots of angels. A few weeks later when M & J went up to the temple at Jerusalem as prescribed by Jewish law, they had two encounters with rather sad characters, neither of which were particularly helpful or, at the time, illuminating. They had other things on their mind, like the embarrassment of only being able to afford the “poor people’s” sacrifice for their firstborn. However, one of the ups some months later, when things had begun to settle down, was the visit of well-heeled foreigners who actually brought gifts with them. Some of the gifts were quite valuable. But still, confusing.

Perhaps they thought that now things would calm down. They’d be able to settle, maybe in the civilized south somewhere around Bethlehem, or maybe in a Jerusalem suburb. Mary had recovered from the birth, and the child was healthy and growing well (always a relief in a time when infant and maternal mortality were much higher than they are now). Maybe some of the scandal was beginning to dissipate. But, again, things took a turn for the worse. The local government at the time was controlled by a paranoid brute called Herod. He had got wind of religious speculation that a “messiah” (ie a competitor) had been born. This started a train of events which meant that Joe and his (now) wife Mary, and the baby, had to run further south still, further from home and family, all the way to a foreign country (perhaps funded by the presents they had received). The child wasn’t yet two years old, and he was now both a political and religious refugee. Around the same time Herod sent his army into Bethlehem and the surrounding area to butcher male children aged two and under. Did Mary and Joe hear about this in exile? Was relief tinged with a certain guilt? Their exile only ended after Herod’s death perhaps months later. After another long journey they arrived back in Nazareth. Who knows what sort of welcome they received, if any welcome at all. They probably hoped for a quiet life. They were to be disappointed. Grim.

And yet the real event here is mind-blowing, with big implications for our here and now. A child was born in Bethlehem, in the midst of all that social and practical mayhem. But what only gradually emerged was that this was no ordinary child. It seemed as if He had lived before. Of course He had. Because while a child was born, the Son had been given. This was God becoming something different, the God-Man. What had been promised on the Old Testament, what is revealed in the New, is that there in Bethlehem “the Word became flesh”. It would take Christians about 400 hundred years to get their collective heads around this. They would have to find new concepts to put into words what had happened. But one of the things that can help us in our current circumstances is that it did not happen in a palace or in comfort or in safety. It happened in grubby and grim circumstances. It is in such circumstances that God often works out His purposes.

Never mind light at the end of the tunnel. This is light in the midst of darkness. It is light that we need now.

Christmas 2020: In the pandemic………

Twists and turns. Just a few days ago the exciting news of the roll out of COVID19 vaccinations had us all thinking that things were on the turn. Then came the twist: the virus has mutated in a way that makes it more transmissible, if not necessary more deadly. This has led to a tightening of restrictions in the UK around what we can and cannot do this Christmas. Arrangements made after the previous loosening of restrictions will have to be broken. We had one son in transit when the tightened restrictions were announced and a daughter north of the “closed” Scottish border in a quandary. I can think of worse places to be stuck, but it is an unwelcome and unpleasant quandary none-the-less. But all of this should remind us once again; life is fragile and we’re not entirely in control – any of us.

It should also prompt the asking of those big questions, what is going on and why? There are a whole load of different ways you could answer the first of those questions, depending on what you think is being asked. In recent months it has had, at least publicly for the politicians, a narrow focus. A pandemic has happened (as has frequently been predicted), but we are going to be fine eventually because science, technology and good logistics will come to our aid. There is a problem, but we can fix it, and most of us are going to return to some sort of  fairly acceptable “normality”. On this reading of the situation, the other question – why – also has a narrow focus. It distils down to a set of factual questions about what sparked the pandemic and how it developed. It can be answered with reference to wet markets in China (or even dodgy virology labs), and government inaction or incompetence. It can be padded out with reference to the proportion of the population infected and the number of lives lost. Economic damage can be quantified in the currency of your choice or in terms of the proportion of GDP lost. The methods used and the time taken to develop and deploy vaccines can be described and measured. In some ways this narrow approach has a lot to recommend it. At a time of stress and anxiety, it restores some sense of understanding and control. We have recovered from catastrophes before and life has gone on; it always does and it always has to.

Of course these narrow questions and their answers have the disadvantage that for most of us, even if we are comforted by them, we are also likely to be slightly disconcerted. They leave nagging doubts lurking in the recesses of our minds and imaginations. The narrow approach leaves out of the account other questions and answers, those that pertain to motives and values, deeper causes and their more troubling effects. This is where, as I’ve pointed out before, science is of limited help. Even before we get to what might be called questions of deep causation, we already have the questions raised by the crippling inequalities revealed by the pandemic. While some may fret because their Christmas skiing trip has had to be abandoned, there are parents wondering whether there will be food for both them and their children tomorrow lunchtime, or will they have to fast while their children eat? This is before we get to big cross-continent and cross planet issues like who gets which vaccine when and for how much. Are such inequalities inevitable? And even if they are, why are they? Why, in this world will the poor always be with us? It is easy to understand why the narrow approach is the more comforting one, even if the comfort it supplies is cold and tinged with guilt.

And yet, even this level of discourse still seems to miss something. Perhaps an outside perspective is needed. But where might we obtain a perspective which is outside all of humanity? The starting point is the realisation that we are not all there is, and we are not all that matters. To this end, it is this time of year that supplies some of the necessary resources. We should regard the appearance of the pandemic as a global signpost. But I’ve been obsessing about the signpost and not what it points to: precisely that humanity is in trouble and cannot fix itself. The world at all levels is neither what it could be, but beyond that is not as it should be. And of course there is somewhere I can turn that will explain this. The opening chapters of Genesis in the Bible are clear: this is a cursed world. In such a world, bad things happen. This implicates all of us, and we can do little but suffer the effects if we depend on out own resources. And yet into this cursed world, someone voluntarily comes who is Himself not cursed. That is what is going on in Bethlehem. But to stop at Bethlehem is to suffer from perpetual baby syndrome. Bethlehem was only a prelude to the main event in which Jesus, the man the baby became, was Himself cursed. That did not immediately remove the curse and its effects from the rest of us; pandemics obviously still happen. But it was the fulfilment of a long made promise that the curse would be dealt with and an escape provided. And at a time still future to us, it will be entirely removed in the establishment of a new (uncursed) heaven and earth. It is here that we find both the deeper questions, but also the answers to them.

Of course I know that my way of framing these issues is now somewhat counter-cultural (to say the least). In polite and educated circles, only "natural" questions and answers are allowed. Well, you can stick with the narrow, technical, natural approach if you wish. But in the promise delivered in Bethlehem is to be found the answer to both what and why whatever twists and turns lie ahead.

Life in the Pandemic XVI: The light at the end of the tunnel

The great sulk continues in the actual Whitehouse. The great contrast with the Bartlett Whitehouse continues (yes, I know it’s made up, but I’m still enjoying it). The great pandemic continues. Indeed in the land of the Whitehouse it is getting unbelievably worse. Each day in the US literally thousands are now dying, with the numbers still growing. No slick drama could cover this misery. Or the tearful frustration of healthcare workers at the end of their endurance pleading with people and politicians alike to do what can easily be done to ease the situation. We have our moments on this side of the Atlantic, and have endured our own share of political chaos and incompetence during the pandemic, but it does not seem to have reached quite the proportions of the Trumpian dystopia in the US. However, a light has now appeared at the end of the COVID tunnel.

Thanks to a remarkable effort and a ton of public money, there is now good evidence of no less than three effective vaccines, and slightly weaker evidence for at least two more. These have already been used on tens of thousands of people in various clinical trials. In the UK the first vaccine was authorised for use on the 2^nd December, and the needles were stuck in the first arms earlier this week. There are lots of people who deserve lots of credit for these achievements. Those who pioneered some of the underlying science behind the “Pfizer” and “Moderna” vaccines certainly deserve credit because they have come up with a new way of designing and producing vaccines which, at least in this case, appear to be amazingly effective. In the case of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine (not far from approval now), science plus some inspired guesswork appear to have produced the most usable of these initial vaccines. Because of its simpler production, ease of transport and robustness, this is the one that will perhaps have the most global impact. (Some) politicians and the regulators deserve credit too. There appears to have been little haggling over funding to push forward with trials, and real cooperation to expedite both trials and approvals without compromising safety. If there has been a conspiracy, it has been to advance as quickly and safely as possible, and it has achieved something of real and lasting benefit. And for once those on the outside of the rich, industrialised and wealthy world have not been forgotten. Yes, I’m sure grubby politics and grubbier economics will soon reassert themselves, but for now it’s worth smiling about much of this. But, of course, it is just the start.

There is a world of difference between a vaccine and vaccination. The real value of the work that has been done will only be realised when the vaccines end up in peoples’ arms. There are lots of other people we will need to rise to meet a whole different heap of challenges before we approach the end of the pandemic tunnel. Manufacturing enough vaccine for close to the whole human population of the planet is hardly trivial. Production problems have already reduced the rate at which the newly approved Pfizer vaccine can be rolled out in the UK. And after making the stuff, it has to be transported, and then distributed. For the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines this is a challenge because they appear to be rather delicate requiring very cold transportation and storage temperatures, and minimal handling. That's why it’s the Oxford vaccine, which is slightly more robust and happy at roomish temperatures, will probably have the global impact. Once all of these challenges have been overcome, there is the issue of the population’s willingness to bare their arms.

This will all take time. So for at least the next few months most of us will need to do what the media claims we’re all sick of doing. The routine of facemasks, social distancing, handwashing and lots of working from laptops at home where we can, will all have to continue. Restrictions on activities we all used to take for granted will also continue. And if we don’t stick to this, more people will die than would otherwise be the case. Maybe, just maybe, next summer we might be returning to something akin to what we used to think of as normality. The virus won’t have disappeared of course. And we don’t know how quickly our new-found, vaccine stimulated immunity will. So care will still be needed. There remain many unknowns. In reality we have a distance to travel in the tunnel, and the light, while reasonably bright, isn’t stellar yet.

Which brings me to what I’ve been reflecting on. The COVID tunnel is far from humanity’s longest or darkest. COVID vaccines, impressive as they are, are no solution to our biggest problem. Indeed, although they are vital, it would be a great mistake to indulge in any collective hubris about our achievements, before moving on to some other issue. After all, it was almost certainly human activity that led to the pandemic in the first place. And before most of us adopt a smug attitude because we know whose fault it all is (or think we do), there’s plenty of collective blame to go around for all sorts of abuses that have exacerbated the pandemic. Some of the very same things may well lead to the next global disaster. And that’s all before we get to other things like the climate crisis. It turns out that the inevitable progress of humanity has never been inevitable at all. And sometimes progress is not as progressive as is claimed. In economics, poverty abounds and seems only to shift rather than decline (although statistically until the pandemic progress had been made). In health as we’ve seen, old diseases may be conquered (if not eradicated) but new ones emerge. Even although poverty, illness, war and famine are avoidable, we manage not to avoid them. There are lots of good things that we can now do which previous generations didn’t even dream about. But for all that we appear to be largely stuck.

Maybe this is because fundamentally humanity’s big problems aren’t intellectual or technical. Therefore the really big issues do not have intellectual or technical solutions. The nub of our problems are moral, and beyond that, spiritual. The real tunnel we’re naturally stuck in is that we’re just not what or who we are supposed to be. But particularly at this time of year, we remember a light that appeared. And it appeared not at the end of our tunnel, but in the middle of it. It would be hard to put it better than John put it at the beginning of his Gospel:

^9 “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. ¹¹ He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. ¹² Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— ¹³ children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” John 1:9-13

Note to self: It’s time I stopped fixating on the pandemic, and considered again the events that culminated in the arrival in this very world of Jesus, who came to illuminate the way out of this very tunnel.

Life in the Pandemic XV: The big story…..

I’ve already confessed my liking for “The West Wing”, which for the record I’m continuing to enjoy. I know that at the very end of the umpteen seasons there will be an episode about the transition between the eponymous hero and his successor. It will of course, once again, stand as a stark contrast with the great sulk currently going on in the Whitehouse. If you need another reminder of just how different what is currently playing out is to previous US presidential elections, go online and watch the concession speeches of John McCain and Mitt Romney (both of the same party as the current occupant of the Whitehouse, conceding to a winner from the other party), or Al Gore (conceding to George W. after the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount). You’ll find a further contrast in how Obama and Biden handled the transition to Trump and Pence - they offered full and friendly cooperation, notwithstanding the nonsense, slander and ignorance that they’d endured for years from Trump.

Trump’s presidency began with chaos and incompetence. Apparently much of the transition advice and support offered to his transition team was spurned. Team Trump knew better and trusted nothing. They were the great disruptors, and didn’t need any advice from a corrupt Washington elite. It didn’t work out well, and it isn’t ending well. We then found ourselves listening to arguments about the size of the Trump crowd at his inauguration – poor Shawn Spicer had to insist that it was larger than Obama’s, when all the evidence was to the contrary (although Obama really wasn’t that bothered). This led to an early example of Trump double-speak introduced on his behalf by Kellyanne Conway – she of “alternative facts” fame. That all occupied a couple of weeks of Presidential and media attention while he should have been getting on with the business of governing. Some stuff didn’t get done. Other stuff (like the “Muslim ban”) was done sloppily and blocked, at least initially, in the courts. And then of course we had four more years of the same, ending with the grotesque incompetence of the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. We can argue about the politics. But this last calumny has cost lives. It’s difficult to say how many, and all the blame should not be laid at Trump's door, but a big slice of it should. Now he apparently splits his time between sulking, tweeting and golfing. Meanwhile, more of his countrymen get sick, and more of them die.

Some will say, of course, that there have been real achievements in the US in the last four years, like a booming economy (arguable and now moot) and a much more conservative US Supreme Court (unarguable). But Mexico paid for no wall, the swamp was more than topped up, and US standing in the world was devalued (to the delight of autocrats and dictators everywhere). Partisan politics is one thing. But why over 70 million US voters find this so attractive a record that they voted for “four more years” has me stumped. I suppose at a minimum it shows that Trump has moved the dial with ongoing consequences for US and world politics when he goes (assuming he does). But does any of this matter? In a funny way I want to argue that in one sense that it really doesn’t. I should have my attention elsewhere.

It takes an effort to remember what life was like pre-Trump, just like it takes an effort to remember what life was like pre-pandemic. So much has apparently changed in a relatively short space of time. And I have to confess much of the detail of the period has sucked me in. That’s partly because of the nature of what’s going on, and partly because I’m me – I like the detail of stuff. With the benefit of the interweb and the twenty-four hour news cycle, those of us who are so inclined have been able to hang of every vote tally, from every state, in the US election (if we wanted to). We’ve been able to overdose on commentary, counter commentary, claim and nuance. Through the pandemic we’ve been able to see the numbers from across the world, compare first peaks and second peaks, argue about the true value of “r”, fret about the number of recruits to phase 3 vaccine studies. And on, and on. But there’s a bigger, deeper picture to be seen, and it’s the one that should have been holding my attention. I don’t mean that the instead of attending to the minutiae we should instead track and discuss big claimed cultural or intellectual shifts or economic and political trends instead. Such things may or may not be of interest. What I do mean is that underpinning the detail and the “big shifts” there is an even bigger story, and that’s the one I should be focused on.

Let me illustrate with what might seem like a digression. There’s a lot of history in the Old Testament. It’s not quite history as we would find it today in a history textbook. That’s not because what is recorded is untrue (although I admit this is contested), it’s because the Bible’s concern is about motive and meaning as much as it is about times, places, people, comings, goings and doings. Buried away in the book of 2 Kings, you’ll find an account of the reign of a king called Jeroboam II summed up in all of six verses (2 Kings 14:23-29). In many ways Jeroboam was very successful and effective. If you or I were writing a history of ancient Israel we would probably have lingered over him much longer than the writer of 2 Kings does. If you lived in Israel at the time of Jeroboam II, you might well have thought that things were going rather well. For many people at the time things seemed politically, economically and militarily stable at home and even abroad (a rare thing there and then). Politics in his day wasn’t quite the same as today of course, but no doubt Jeroboam and those around the royal court thought this had something to do with them. Spiritually, they had hedged their bets. There was certainly plenty of religion around, some designed to keep God placated, and some to keep other “deities” happy too. They should have known better, and indeed could have known better by paying attention to what God was saying in their day. What He had to say to them can be found in two or three other OT books (Hosea, Jonah and Amos). It does not make for comfortable reading. Underneath the detail of those days, was the Living God working out His purposes. And that was the bigger story that got completely missed. What you’ll find in Hosea, Amos and Jonah still speaks today.

That bigger story is still being told and those same purposes are still being worked out. While the connection between the nitty gritty detail and the big picture are from moment to moment fairly opaque (at least to me), I have a whole Bible that makes clear the big picture, the direction of travel, and the purposes of God, which it turns out are far from mysterious. As with so many areas of life, not being able to understand everything is not the same as understanding nothing. It is this story I should be fixated on. While the West Wing may be diverting entertainment, and  CNN (other news organisation are available) may be a useful stimulus to informed prayer, the big story is His story. That’s what underpins, shapes or critiques every other story. That is where my attention really should be.

Life in the Pandemic XIV: The fictional and the fake……

I freely admit it. I’m a fan of Sorkin snappy dialogue. Aaron Sorkin is the screenwriter behind films like “A Few Good Men”, “Charlie Wilson’s War”, “Moneyball” and “The Social Network”. And I’ve just started re-watching his classic TV political drama “The West Wing”. This used to be my treat when I had to travel to conferences far away. Those were the days when we climbed into things called aeroplanes and flew thousands of miles just to give tiny little ten-minute talks and listen to lots of other little ten-minute talks. Those were the days when we felt blessed if our laptops had things called CD drives (or slightly later DVD drives) into which we placed discs containing films or TV series. While this meant that the laptop weighed about the same as a sack of potatoes, it provided a means of whiling away hours at airports, on flights or during evenings spent in mid-budget hotel rooms. So, spread over a couple of years I watched my way through the seven series of The West Wing in the mid to late naughties. 

It centred on the goings on in the West Wing of the Whitehouse during the two terms of the fictional Bartlet presidency. The main protagonists were the smart, witty, morally-superior and, of course, left-leaning senior staff that surrounded the President. President Bartlet himself was of course a Democrat, and was a (fairly conscientious) Roman Catholic and ex-academic economist turned Governor of New Hampshire. The interplay between the President and his communications directors (Toby), or between Josh and the press secretary CJ, or between the President’s “body man” Charlie and Sam the speech-writer, or between any and all of them was a rollercoaster ride of wit and apparent, knowing wisdom. It could be a bit preachy at times, but occasionally dealt with serious subjects and there was the odd tear-jerking moment.  Despite the fact that I had very little in common with any of these characters, and that even the political system they worked within was (by definition) foreign to me, I was hooked within an episode. And even although US evangelicals (and by extension all of us, because we’re obviously a single monolithic block) got a good kicking in about episode 3 of series 1, I stayed hooked right to the very end as the Bartlet presidency came to its natural and inescapable end with the transition to a new (Democratic) administration.

The contrast between Barlet’s  fictional Whitehouse and the current Trump Whitehouse is fairly stark. In the fictional version, there was frequently chaos, but you always new that the chaos was more apparent than real and that things would probably work out. Everyone on the team basically knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. So there was a basic competence that ran deep, even if on the surface there was just a lot of running around going on. And at the top, Bartlet always led in roughly the right direction. Even when he had to agonise over difficult choices, he would think it through, within a broadly recognisable moral framework, and provide the lead that everyone else needed. Occasionally, because he was a politician, he dissembled, and wasn’t entirely transparent. There were secrets that were kept, and others that eventually exploded. There were mistakes, but Bartlet (this being fiction) was big enough and self-assured enough to admit them. All the time these were people who were at least trying to be truthful and decent.

For the last four years even the friends of a real, rather than fictional, president of the United States would have to admit that basic decency, empathy and truth have been in short supply. To be fair, Trump has delivered on some of the big promises he made, promises that persuaded less than half of the US voting population to vote for him. High on the list would be a considerably more conservative Supreme Court and a big tax cut. Of course, who knows what the new shape of the court will produce in the long-term, and the tax cut was of little use to the massed ranks of many of his supporters (although it was a big boost to rich Americans and richer corporations). As the 2020 election campaign heads towards its climax, this allows his boosters to counsel that the population of the US should concentrate on what the Donald has done (or at least some of the things he’s done), not who he is. One odd thing is that so much of both what he’s done, and who he is, is so much stranger than fiction. While not a fictional politician, Trump has turned out to be a fake. Fake outsider, fake man of the people, fake deal-maker, fake wall-builder, fake man of faith and Bible lover. Had Sorkin written a script that was anything approaching the last four years and tried to get it made into a film or TV series, he would have been laughed out of town.

I know that the Bartlet Whitehouse was made up. But basic competence and decency really should not be too much to ask. We all understand that hard choices have to be made, often between bad and worse alternatives. This is probably even more the case in the pandemic. But such choices require accurate information, careful thought and broad, civilised discussion, and should be both intelligible and explained (at least in a democracy). Even when disputed, at least a dialogue can ensue, and perhaps things improved for the future. A lack of accurate information is not always the fault of politicians, but a lack of careful thought is unforgivable. We all understand that wrong choices are occasionally made, particularly against a background of incomplete information. Politicians should be able to change course as more information becomes available without the constant chorus of U-turn media political catastrophism. U-turns are sometimes necessary, and if explainable and explained, probably forgivable. But we’ve seen none of this from the Trump Whitehouse, who have scrapped with each other, have exulted in ignorance and even elevated it above competence, and then resorted to complete fantasy. Fantasy that isn’t nearly as compelling or attractive as The West Wing. Leading the charge has been the Donald himself and then he wonders why he’s not loved.

Commenting on the outcome of the 2020 election, Sorkin himself said “I would write the ending where everyone does the right thing. I don’t think Trump will do the right thing, except by accident.” We’ll see shortly.

Life in the Pandemic XIII: Living, doing and knowing……

Here in the England’s northwest, the second wave has well and truly arrived. In Liverpool, our cases and hospitalisations are up and rising, and we have just had new restrictions imposed on us. I have discussed modelling and predictions previously, but we didn’t need a model to predict the predicament we now face. In the Spanish ‘flu pandemic of 1918/19 there are reckoned to have been three waves, with later waves more deadly than the first. Talk of the second wave of COIVD19 has been around since the early summer. In France case numbers began to climb in early August, and deaths (still mercifully low) in September. In Spain it was slightly earlier (and may be receding now). The actual number of cases detected is not the key statistic to focus on because it depends on the testing regime, but the trajectory is clear enough (you can see the relevant plots in the Worldometer Coronavirus site). But, given we’re now into month nine of the pandemic (if we assume it started for real in February), and given the effort that has gone into learning about this new virus, why are we again on the verge of major lockdowns, with all the misery and damage such a state of affairs implies?

It’s not that we haven’t learned anything. The spread of the virus has been followed and probed and information about how transmissible it is has been gleaned. Spread is not just dependant on the properties of the virus, but on the characteristics of the populations exposed to it. But this too is increasingly well understood. How the virus is spread, how long it can survive in the air and on surfaces, have also been the subject of study and debate. And of course who is likely to (and not likely to) get seriously ill, be hospitalised, need ventilation and in some cases die, is now better understood. There are now treatment options available to combat both the virus and its effects, which of course the President of the United States recently availed himself of. All of this hopefully means that in second and subsequent waves, fewer will die than in the first wave, at least proportionately. We are about to find out. And on the horizon there are multiple vaccines, although decent evidence of their efficacy is still not available, and their arrival is not certain.

Perhaps more important than all of this is that we’ve known for months how to combat the virus, and its spread, in inexpensive, simple and effective ways. These are methods that almost all of us are capable of adopting, and in practical terms they don’t interfere too much with all the things we all have to do day to day in our daily lives. Currently in the UK they can be summarised using the Government mantra of “hands, face, space”. Frequent handwashing, wearing facemasks and keeping a reasonable distance between folk from different households, if followed by most of us, would have perhaps saved thousands of lives in the first wave (when effective treatments were still being developed), would have prevented the expected second wave (probably), and could still save thousands of lives now that we are in the midst of the second wave. At least in the UK these measures remain relatively uncontroversial, unlike in the US where they’ve got caught up in politics. So what’s the problem?

The problem is us, all of us. Most of us, as individuals, haven’t experienced the virus (yet). We may have heard of friends or family members who have experienced it first hand, but in many cases their experience was of a mild illness. And although daily cases in the tens of thousands sounds like a lot, it is a small proportion in a population of millions. And even this low level of actual experience is very patchy. The media have worked hard to expose us to the sights and sounds of the trouble the virus can cause. But this is relatively out of kilter with the lived experience of most of us, and comes from a media that various segments of the population distrust. Many appear just not to get it (as an example see this report). None of this is to deny the seriousness of the virus, or to in any way minimise the experience of those who have lost loved ones to it. There are far too many of them (more than there should have been). But it remains the case that this experience, horrible and tragic as it is, is a minority experience. And the problem is that we live in a culture which prioritises experience over knowledge. So while “science” is relatively clear, and the warnings that flow from it are fairly dire, many feel that none of this really applies to them. They will escape and don’t have to heed the warnings. Mask wearing and the rest of the actions they should take, don’t have to be taken too seriously. There isn’t really a need to err on the side of caution.

The problem then becomes one of compliance; we know what we should do, we know what the “scientists” say we should do. Their claim is that if we do these simple things across the population, there is abstract information showing that it will be a good thing and lives will be saved. But we just don’t do it.  Compliance falls. And it is always easier to blame others for the situation that results from this. “Others” may be culpable of course. Government may have been inconsistent, the elite may have got away with flouting rules, some of the modelling may have overstated the impact of the first wave, and all of the modelling comes with a degree of uncertainty. All this may be true, but while it may provide me with excuses for not doing what I should be doing (because it’s mildly inconvenient), none of these are reasons. Meantime, cases, hospitalisations and deaths all climb, although much of this was probably avoidable. My “truth”, what is true for me based on my actual experience, trumps the truth.

Given all of this, I find it completely understandable, that when I try to explain the existence of a whole other aspect of reality, folk are generally sceptical. I concede that the idea that a person who died a long time ago and a long way away has any relevance to anyone today is, on the face of it, far fetched. And as for the claim that the same person came back to life, and that His death and life have both personal and cosmic significance? Well I can see why this might not all compute. And of course, all of my evidence for this is beyond experience, and comes from an ancient book. All this in a culture that prioritises experience over truth. I see the problem.

Doesn’t mean it’s not all true of course.

Life in the Pandemic XII: What lies ahead?

No human being can tell the future. Lot’s of us try to guess the future, and claim that we’re making a prediction. If enough of us do that enough times, someone is  going to guess well and apparently predict the future correctly. But this will be apparent rather than real. There are those who make a living out of (apparently) predicting the future. This is not because they are good guessers, and it’s certainly not because they know something not knowable by the rest of us.  Often it’s because their “predictions” are so vague as to be interpretable as being fulfilled by something at some time. Of course this means that there are also so vague as to be of no practical use. Perhaps the best evidence of this is that they make their living making “apparently” reliable predictions, not by actually predicting winning lottery numbers or placing big bets on unlikely events. And of course because of selection and confirmation biases, we tend not to notice the predictions that aren’t, and take to twitter about their successful guesses.

Deep down in the pandemic we’ve all become familiar with another kind of prediction. From early on the media has been awash with dire warnings based on the reporting of predictive scientific models used to project the future course of the pandemic. Some of these have been extremely influential. The Imperial College model developed by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team is credited with persuading the UK Government to enforce a UK-wide “lockdown” back in March. Their model suggested that without appropriate suppression of the virus the UK might be facing up to 500 000 deaths, breaking the healthcare system and devastating the economy. However, this model, and models in general, have been fiercely criticized in some quarters as being scarcely an improvement on Mystic Meg. It’s claimed that they are not only failing now, but have performed poorly in the past.

But it’s important to understand what scientific models do and don’t do. Firstly they are inevitably based on what is known when they are constructed and on assumptions. Even what is known is usually not known with certainty or great precision, so choices always have to be made leading to uncertainty being baked in to any model. Where important information is missing, then assumptions have to be made. Bad assumptions lead to a poor model. Secondly, no model captures everything; any model is a simplification. It is, after all, a model and not reality. Uncertainties around inputs, plus simplifications in construction, mean that the outputs of any model tend to provide a range of possible outcomes, along with estimates of precision. Even in a model that perfectly captured all that was going on in a given situation, small changes of input assumptions and parameters, would have a big effect on outputs. There are no certainties to be found here, just sets of likelihoods. This is better than guessing, and may offer a way of avoiding complete disaster, but it is not a means of predicting the future with precision and certainty. And models are not proscriptive they are ultimately descriptive. They don’t tell how things must be; they describe how they might be.

However, as with other situations in life, it’s important not to confuse our inability to know everything, with the inevitability of knowing nothing. It’s not that we know nothing about the future course of the pandemic. If we take certain actions then the course of the pandemic will be altered in certain ways.  Not being able to know everything about the future, is not the same as being totally ignorant of the future. So what are we to make of where we are and what’s going on? The pandemic is a perspective-shaping event. It should have reminded us all of how fragile our lives, both individually and collectively, are. It has forced a re-evaluation of what really matters. And that re-evaluation should include considerations about where things are headed.

It seems to me that we are at an intersection of events that are significant. In addition to the pandemic, there are other events that are worth pondering. Earlier in the year Australia was ablaze. According to ABC News, over the 2019/20 Australian summer over 30 million acres went up in smoke, killing animals in their hundreds of millions, and affecting the health of a large proportion of the human population. This would be bad enough. But in the western US over the last few weeks, forest fires in unprecedented numbers and of unprecedented size have already destroyed of the order of 4 million acres and are still burning fiercely. Add to that fires in the Amazon and Siberia, and you have impacts on a planetary scale. This is likely to exacerbate the climate impact of human activity, about which we have heard much in recent years. To public health and climate events, add the political instability now been seen in what has historically been a politically stable country, the US. It’s hard to underestimate just how troubling Donald Trump’s recent pronouncements about the peaceful transition of power have been. This is playing with fire of a very different kind. In the worlds largest economy and most powerful military power this matters to us all. It might just be the craziness of one strange individual. But, taken together all of these goings on seem to be very unlike business as usual.

Given what I’ve already said about prediction, I am not now going to claim any special knowledge on my part that can illuminate where we are and what’s going on. But it is perhaps worth pointing out that there is a source of knowledge available to all of us that is always worth taking note of. My conviction is that neither history nor the future just happen; they have a shape and a trajectory, and we needn’t be completely ignorant of either. Underpinning and driving all that has and will happen is the God who reveals His purposes in His word, the Bible. If you’re looking for key explanations this is where to turn. And you’ll find a prediction or two. Because while none of us knows what’s ahead, this isn’t such a big deal for a God who is eternal.

One final aside. One of the odd by-products of the pandemic, is that it's easier than even to lurk unseen in church services. If taking God and the Bible strike you as strange but you're intrigued, there are lots of places you can find out more. We'll be "at church" shortly; feel free to join us online.

Life in the Pandemic XI: Why science can never be enough.

In the interests of transparency, I should make clear from the outset that I think science is, without doubt, the best way of obtaining sound answers to certain types of questions. And just at the moment, some of those questions are pressing. Here in the pandemic we desperately need to know whether convalescent plasma treatment works, and if it does, how well.  We need to know if any of the vaccines currently being investigated confer immunity to the SARS-COV-2 virus, and if so, how long that immunity lasts. Despite claims by the Presidents of both the US and Russia, these questions remain open. The only way they can be answered is properly constructed clinical trials, which are ongoing. The answer/s will come when they come. Spin, propaganda, political will or economic desperation will not bring them any sooner. Such claims as have been made, appear to be based on political considerations and (sometimes wilful) ignorance, and those making these claims are seeking to exploit the ignorance of the population at large. That they have been perpetrated at all is just one line of evidence that science on its own is never enough.

Part of the problem is that science does not take place in any kind of vacuum, be it political, cultural or ethical (the one exception being science done in a vacuum!). It is a human activity carried on by human beings. Its results, and what flows from them, be those novel medical treatments, new technology, or new answers to age-old questions and problems, have to be understood and then used (where they have a use) by human beings. While as an institution and community science is, at least over the medium term, fairly critical and self-correcting, it can and has produce flawed results and wrong answers. The practitioners of science (ie scientists) are, as individuals, as flawed and fickle as the rest of humanity. Most try to practice their science in a competent, professional and serious way. A minority are known to have behaved fraudulently, with the intent to deceive, usually for some sort of gain. There is sense in which science is under attack from within by this minority. And their activities devalue the whole enterprise. It certainly means that the scientific enterprise is much less efficient than it might be. However, it also risks bringing the whole scientific enterprise into public disrepute (much as has occurred with journalism and politics). So, to bolster science’s self-regulation and self-correction functions, various mechanisms have been introduced, like the US Office of Scientific Integrity or academic and scientific integrity processes in individual institutions. But policing science, practicing it properly, upholding commitments to honesty, decency and transparency, is not a scientific matter, it’s a matter of ethics. And ethics isn’t science. These things really matter for the continuing ability of science to get good answers to tough questions. But they are not themselves scientific. Another example of science on its own not being enough.

Science’s foundations, its method/s (there isn’t “a” scientific method), and lots of elements of its practice are also not themselves “scientific”. What I mean is that they do not proceed along those classic lines from hypothesis, to predictions, to tests and measurement leading to results. They are the stuff of starting assumptions and a necessary framework of commitments that make science work. If science had been proved not to work, then I suppose they would have come under more scrutiny. But now they are so baked in they have become invisible. Philosophers and historians of science have largely given up trying to crack “the” mystery of how science works because so much of it is about all this invisible, intellectual “dark matter”. But this is another way in which science on its own isn’t enough. Scientific method, properly conceived, isn’t entirely scientific.

One of the things science is really good at is making measurements in an organised and objective way, so that the results once obtained can command widespread agreement. This isn’t just about the results themselves, but it’s also about the scrutiny that all scientific results have to be placed under. This is the sort of community activity most commonly seen in the processes of publishing scientific results via peer review, exposure at conferences and the like. This is a key part of the process that leads to sound knowledge in any given field which provides the launchpad for the next phase of progress. In a given field, once the basics are established, there’s no need to go back to square one each time, and so effort can focus on extending and refining explanations and knowledge, making them more powerful in the process. But as powerful as scientific explanations and knowledge might be, they only provide information about, and control over, natural processes by way of statements of facts. The conundrum is that usually this is not really what interests people. David Attenborough documentaries about the state of the planet only get you so far. What occupies most people most of the time isn’t the answer to the what and how questions, but the answer to why questions. And establishing what “is”, is far from establishing what “should be”. We may be cooking the planet, we may be imperilling biodiversity on a global scale. But beyond the notion that might not be in our long term health or economic interests, why is this a bad thing? That’s not a question of science, but a question of values. It’s these values questions that are the important and tricky ones, and science can never give us the complete answer to them.

And here’s the real kicker. Science is all about reason. This is a problem. Because individually and collectively all human beings are not merely rational. Reasons other than reason often drive our behaviour and influence our decisions. Indeed, even if it were true that on average the human population did behave rationally, given human variability that simply means that there will be a lot irrationality about. And science on its own can’t help with that (beyond measuring accurately the irrationality). This type of irrationality can be viewed almost nightly on news channels where people deny the pandemic, and state quite openly that no way will they accept vaccination against the “fake flu”. Only a minority need to adopt this irrational stance (it flies in the face of the evidence), to undermine the usefulness of a C19 vaccination for everyone.

So, deep down here in the pandemic we certainly need science. It will provide us with desperately needed tools. But on its own it cannot guarantee that those tools will be used effectively. Never confuse science with salvation.

Life in the Pandemic X: Exacerbating uncertainty

 Many things in life are uncertain (apart from death and taxes obviously). And many things are uncertain in science. Indeed identifying, controlling and quantifying uncertainty is a key aspect of the practice of science. We’re so keenly aware of uncertainty that we try to dissuade students of talking about science “proving” things, as though in any given situation absolutely all uncertainty can be removed. We don’t think that it can be, and we can therefore never be “certain”. What we seek to do is accumulate evidence supporting a particular explanation for a given phenomenon so that it moves from being highly provisional (a hypothesis), to being fairly probably the correct explanation (a supported hypothesis), to being the best and most highly supported explanation we have (at which point it’s  usually elevated to the status of a theory). This takes time and effort. Even so, we also accept that the most accepted theory, with apparently lots of supporting evidence, can always be superseded by a new theory. This might be an extension of the original theory, or indeed a contradiction of it. But this whole approach raises  problems. It is tricky to explain (as you may have noticed), and it’s not the way most people think or speak most of the time. These problems (and why they matter) have been amply exposed by the pandemic.

Let’s start with the language problem. There are situations where certainty is conflated with clarity. In a startling reversal of form for the particular bunch of politicians currently running the UK, the pandemic mantra has been “We’re following the science, therefore….”. This is a reversal because it suited them in a previous situation (ie the Brexit debate), to downplay the view of “experts”. But as I’ve noted before, in the pandemic, this has changed. Experts are in; but uncertainty is not out.

Politicians and the media, are very keen on what they call clarity. But COVID19 is a virus new to  humans, and therefore new to science. Nothing was known, indeed could be known, about it (although things could be inferred). Early in the pandemic, at the time when many key decisions were being taken, the science was more than usually uncertain, and therefore the scientific advice to politicians had to be highly caveated (this is an assumption on my part, I wasn’t privy to it). But this doesn’t make for snappy press conferences. And it almost certainly guaranteed that the advice would change, and therefore the instructions issued by politicians would have to change (example: face masks). The media don’t particularly help in such situations. Their stock in trade is the language of u-turn and climb-down. It might have been wise to clearly communicate from the start that the course of action being embarked upon was based on a consensus of what, given the evidence at the time, was reasonable. Not certain, but reasonable. Problem is, would any of us reacted as we need to if the politicians had spoken this way?

To be fair to them, there have been some sceptics and deniers who have been happy to jump up and down and accuse them of exaggerating the danger of the situation for nefarious political ends. They have pointed out that for all the talk of half a million UK dead and the NHS overwhelmed, this was not the disaster that developed. But this is to miss the point. The one experiment that could not be done was the one that involved doing nothing and essentially letting COVID19 run its course. So on the basis of (suitably caveated) advice, we had our lockdown. And while we can’t be certain (that is, after all, the point I’m making), the difference in case and death curves (eg see here) between most EU countries (including the UK) and others like the US and Brazil, suggests that this was indeed a sensible course of action. As an aside, we have to now hope that we don’t blow it, and revert to the earlier trajectory that could lead to disaster. However, at least some of the critics seem to suggest that with all the uncertainty involved, essentially nothing should have been done. Action should only have been taken once all doubt had been removed. But then that would have meant nothing would have been done. And many thousands more would have died, deaths that we have almost certainly avoided. It will perhaps be possible to demonstrate this statistically, once more  evidence has accumulated. But at the point the big political and economic decisions had to be taken, actual evidence was scarce.

We have heard this sort of call to wait for certainty before, both in another contemporary context and historically. And it’s here that the language problem, and the complexity problem intersect. Climate change, its cause, effects and what we should do about it (if we can do anything about it), is undoubtedly complex. The idea that it is caused by human activity (primarily the burning of fossil fuels from the industrial revolution on, increasing atmospheric CO₂) has been a matter of overwhelming scientific consensus for decades ie we’ve gone beyond hypothesis, supported hypothesis, and theory to consensus. Even still, scientists in this area will probably be unwilling to say they have no doubts, that the relevant theory/theories have been “proved” in some absolute sense. That’s just not the appropriate language of science. But that allows others to come along and say that the science is uncertain, there are alternative explanations or the whole thing is just a hoax. Here, a legal analogy might help.

I served on a murder jury some years ago. We were faced with the weighty decision of whether the prosecution had proved its case beyond reasonable doubt. Notice that you can still convict and have doubt. The question is whether the case is proved beyond reasonable doubt. One can always come up with lots of “could be’s” and “might have beens”. But if they fly in the face of the evidence, or are not supported by evidence, then they are not reasonable. And if they are not reasonable, they is no reason to pronounce the defendant “not guilty”. If the scientific consensus around climate change were a defendant in the dock, although there are doubts and uncertainties, they would be ruled out by the evidence as unreasonable, a guilty verdict handed down, and the jury would go away and sleep soundly, their duty done. And yet the uncertainty, complexity, and the language of science conspire to provide a space for those who say we should do nothing because we are not 100% certain, precisely at the time when action has to be taken.

At least some who operate in this space are following in a fairly inglorious tradition that has been exposed several times. They seek to foment doubt and increase complexity, obfuscate evidence and exacerbate uncertainty. They explicitly seek to sow doubt, of the unreasonable sort. The approach was famously summarised by a cigarette company executive in the 1960’s in a now infamous memo which stated “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”(1). What followed was essentially a well funded disinformation campaign of epic proportions. Meanwhile, cigarettes continued to be manufactured, sold and consumed and contributed to the early deaths of millions. The story of this and similar campaigns is expertly revealed in its gory detail by David Michaels in his books (2,3). And there’s evidence that there are commercial and other interests playing the same game with climate change. Stir up doubt, exacerbate the uncertainty, and the public will conclude that either the issues are so complicated and unclear that it would be premature to take action (like ban smoking or increase tax on gas guzzlers), or that the inconvenience of action is not worth uncertain benefits.

This kind of thing is happening in the pandemic. Reasonable people are not taking reasonable actions because, particularly in the US, misinformation is being spread and uncertainty is being exacerbated. The scary bit is that when the much hoped-for vaccine becomes available, we all know it’s likely to start over vaccination against COVID19. But, to resort to some unscientific language, you can be sure that wearing a mask and washing your hands frequently at the moment, and getting vaccinated once one or more vaccines have passed through the requisite trials, is a really good idea. I don’t doubt it.

 1. Michaels D (2005) Doubt is their product. Scientific American 292(6):96-101 (available on Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7806937_Doubt_Is_Their_Product)

 2. Michaels D (2008) Doubt is Their Product. Oxford Univ. Press

 3. Michaels D (2020 )The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception Oxford Univ. Press

Life in the Pandemic IX: Non-convention(al) Keswick

Keswick without the convention, isn’t quite like Anfield or old Trafford without the fans, but there are similarities. The buzz of coming together with thousands of others with a common purpose is hard to beat. It taps into our basic constitution as social beings. But here we are in a pandemic. And one in which, when the threat has loomed large, that collectivist instinct has come to the fore. Ironically we’ve banded together against the common invisible enemy, by hunkering down in our separated households. Of course, there has been technology to help us out. And indeed in a few days’ time there will be a “virtual”, technologically delivered “Keswick”. But it won’t be the same, will it?

By now many of us are used to existing on a diet of Zoom or Teams meetings (other video conferencing technologies are available), some small and some large. We’ve delivered or listened to seminars, asked or answered questions, met, discussed and made decisions. In other words we’ve done most of the things we’d normally do, just in a slightly different way. There have been differences of course. Online meetings probably require slightly more concentration, and seem to be more draining. Many of us have had to catch up on the etiquette (or netiquette) of the online world. And how quickly the media and politicians learned that it was important to sit in front of an impressive, well-stocked bookcase, particularly if the occasional, significant title was turned face on to the camera.

For months now, church too has been online. All the familiar elements are still present: notices (of course), hymns and songs, talks for children, sermons for adults. There have been some advantages of “doing” church this way. No one can see you turning up late. No need to skulk at the back if you are, or make your way to the only available seats (which are always at the very front). No need to dress up (or down). The guitars are always in tune, the singer/singers always on key. And if the sermon is a bit boring, no one can see you scrolling through the Facebook feed on your phone. Or even getting up and going to make a cup of tea. Or (perish the thought) switching off and opting out (if you “turned up” at all).

The objective in coming to Keswick at this time of year is precisely to turn up at the big tent and do many of the same things mentioned above. I know that to some this will seem like a strange way to spend a holiday (something I’ve written about previously). But the Keswick Convention has, for a very long time, provided Bible teaching to a high standard and fairly relaxed worship in a beautiful setting. There’s always the opportunity to dip in and dip out, and intersperse the teaching with other elements of the British summer in the Lake District (walks and ice cream in the rain). And of course conversation with like-minded others – fellowship. This year we’ve had the rain, and we’ve had the ice cream, the surroundings have been beautiful, but we haven’t had the teaching, reflection and fellowship. And it makes a difference.

A crowd always does make a difference. From the mob in ancient Rome requiring bread and circuses to keep them pacified, to the torch-wielding faithful of the Nuremberg rallies, crowds have always been more than the sum of their human parts. The strange, sometimes scary, dynamic of crowds has long been an object of study. Le Bon’s theories from the late 19^th Century are still quoted today. He wasn’t very impressed with crowds. You can find a whole Government manual on how to deal with crowds prepared by the Emergency Planning College (part of the UK Cabinet Office). More trivially, crowds can do some things better than the individuals that comprise them, particularly where expertise plays no particular role. If you have a glass jar full of jelly babies, and ask people how many there are in the jar, the answer averaged over many individual guesses (ie the answer of a crowd) is more likely to be accurate than most of the individual answers. This advantage is dwarfed by the more familiar disadvantages of crowds and their effects on the constituent individuals. People do and say things in football crowds they would never think of doing standing as an individual in the middle of a street. And crowd (or mob) justice is of course, rarely justice at all.

Christian crowds are, at a minimum just that – crowds. At least in history, apparently Christian crowds have been just a capable of excess as any other kind. They are composed of human beings with all the peril that can bring. But precisely that observation shows why they are also important. Human beings are designed to meet and act together. For a Christian crowd, while there obviously are activities to be avoided, some are certainly to be engaged in. Learning together, being taught in a crowd, is something that Jesus Himself was interested in. He taught crowds, and indeed cared for crowds, and was interested in crowds, as much as He was also interested in and taught and cared for individuals. And it seems that while He dealt with and interacted with individuals, it was also often with a view to  teaching a usually much larger group that was looking on. The idea of the gathering is fairly basic to what’s going on in much of the New Testament.

A crowd of course can be any size beyond a minimum, and the minimum appears to be quite small (3?). Even to the smallest crowd, Jesus promises His presence (Matt 18:20), where He is the purpose of the gathering. And many of the things He expects us to do as churches (a name for a particular kind of Christian crowd), are expectations of us as churches, not just individuals. So while we can, and should, pray on our own, we are expected to pray together. While we can read and learn on our own (and should), we should be doing these things together, and indeed publicly. While I can sing on my own (and that’s the way most folk probably prefer it), I’m expected to gather with others to sing. Indeed, I’m supposed to sing to (at?) others, as they are enjoined to sing with and to me (Col 3:16).  We are to benefit from being together and doing things together. Some of this will be the common the benefit of the crowd, plus an awful lot more. But for months now we’ve been prevented from doing these things together, corporately.

It has been entirely legitimate for us not to meet in person for a period, partly because the Civil authority has told us that we can’t. And we understand their pandemic-related reasons for doing this. As in other areas of life, we have turned to technology, and been grateful for it. But it is not the same. Even outwith the pandemic, there has been the occasional suggestion that we don’t lose much by not gathering physically; that we can do Church “online”. This is misconceived at best. Technology has its benefits as a short-term, emergency, fix. But, fundamentally it doesn’t meet that requirement of meeting together that the New Testament is clear about (Heb 10:25). Listening to sermon online is just not the same for either preacher or congregation as joining together in the shared experience that we normally experience (see this post along the same lines). That personal, face to face, together in a crowd meeting, seems actually to be necessary for the stimulus and encouragement that we all need. 

Fuss about nothing, you might respond. After all, there is a sense in which we meet with Jesus remotely! It is only in one sense though – unlike you and me, He isn’t limited to a particular location. That said, we don’t “see Him now” (1 Pet 1:8). But of course our hope is that one day the situation will be transformed and we really will see Him, and be with Him, collectively. Is anyone seriously going to suggest that as good as things can be here and now (and Peter says that even in current circumstances we can know “joy inexpressible”), it won’t be better then?

So hopefully, one Sunday soon we’ll be back together the way we should be. And hopefully, by this time next year, we be gathering in Keswick for the 2021 convention, much as we've enjoyed just rain and ice cream this year.

Life in the Pandemic VIII: So many goodbyes….

There are many folk who are grieving these days and having to say their goodbyes. While some probably knew the time was approaching when an older relative, spouse or friend was going to leave this life, they didn’t think it would come so soon, precipitated by an unknown virus, in the midst of a global pandemic. For others death has arrived as an unwelcome, unexpected surprise and shock. And there have been those stunned by an overwhelming sense of injustice at a young life cut tragically short. No death is just a statistic. Each one leaves grief in its wake. Every death matters, just as much as every life.

As long as there have been people, there has been death. It is the inevitable last experience of our lives here, all of which follow a pattern. We move from our earliest memories, on a journey via definable phases and critical events. Shakespeare likened life to a play (of course he did) and talked about how men and women have their  “..exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts; His acts being seven ages.”(1). Less poetically perhaps, I remember enjoying 18^th and 21^st birthday parties with friends. Then it was University graduations and rounds of weddings. There was the arrival of kids (for most), and catching up with family exploits in the occasional Christmas epistle (some of which I actually read). I’m just getting to the stage of metallic wedding anniversaries and those milestone birthdays as the decades accumulate. And also for me, now there is that gradually souring note of parents, aunts and uncles being lost; a hint of what’s to come. The deaths of celebrities and others I grew up with, some I looked up to, are becoming more frequent. The diseases of ageing are beginning to take their toll on my contemporaries. A cancer scare here and there. And instead of births and birthdays, I know it that eventually there will be funerals and condolences. And then….

Fair enough, I know that this might be a bit morbid, but I’m thinking that it needn’t be. I’ll admit that the pandemic has encouraged morbid thoughts. Daily death statistics will do that to you. But we all know that we cannot live in this world forever, even if sometime we secretly think as though death won’t come for us, only other people. In our general culture too, pre-pandemic, death had perhaps become remote, the business of various professionals, leaving the rest of us to get on with living. So thoughts of it could be suppressed, and squeezed down into the farthest, dark recesses of our minds. The pandemic has changed that, at least for the moment. But as well as the pandemic I have two other reasons that have caused me to reflect on this. The first is, as it happens, a death, the second is a book.

Last Tuesday I heard of the death of a man called Peter Maiden(2). I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t know me, although we met on a couple of occasions. He came from, and never moved far from, Carlisle (in the northwest of England, up near the Scottish border). He was widely known as the International Director of a missionary organisation called Operation Mobilisation from 2003 to 2013 (although he had been involved with OM since 1974) and he was a trustee of the Keswick Convention. I heard him teach the Bible on a number of occasions. And although I can’t honestly remember any of the specifics, what does stick in my memory is his manner – gracious, humble, straightforward. Others have been speaking and writing about his influence on them through his teaching, leadership and books. Now, to be honest, his death is not that of a close friend of relative. There are many folk who will be grieving for him in a way that I am not. But I am aware of a loss. He was one of those people who served as a marker for me along the route of my journey. Not just a marker of the way, but a marker of the destination. His teaching and living pointed to a life beyond this life, that in many ways is more important than this life. He devoted his life to sharing and teaching what he took to be the words of God. In the process he was used to influence many thousands, including me. His death is, of course, a demonstration of his mortality, but it is to me a reminder of mine. His life here has ended, something he was prepared for, knowing that more was to come. I wonder - was he deluded to think like this? Were those he influenced deluded? Was (or am) I deluded? I don’t think so.

The book I mentioned above is the snappily titled “Evangelicalism in Britain 1935-1995” by Oliver Barclay(3). I confess it wasn’t one of the ones I mentioned in my last post as being on my summer reading list. I met Oliver Barclay too, when I was a PhD student in the 1980’s, at a Research Scientists Christian Fellowship (now Christians in Science) conference. He belonged to a very different generation, but was a clear and long-sighted thinker, encourager and organiser. In particular, he played a key role in the development of the Intervarsity Fellowship (now UCCF), the organisation that links and supports Christian Unions in universities and colleges in the UK. In the book, he relates the work and struggle of many men and women, who established the evangelical culture and infrastructure that I and many others depended on as we grew and matured in our Christian thinking. There were those who ministered in churches in University cities throughout the UK, with a clear commitment to the transforming truth of the Bible. There were resources like commentaries, and books in critical areas of apologetics, written from a robust evangelical perspective. He mentions the work of many who are now obscure to many of us. And the book stops in 1995 - a quarter of a century ago. As I read Barclay’s book, I found I was reading of many who seemed like giants – Martin Lloyd Jones, J.I. Packer, John Stott and many others beside. Markers for my journey, marking it out even before it began, now receding into the distance. These  were men and women, whether I encountered them personally or not, to whom I owe a great debt. They made the way easier for me, very often at cost to themselves. They were passionate about God and His word. They lived it as well as taught it. They weren’t supermen and women, they weren’t heroes to be placed on high pedestals; every single one of them had his or her flaws. But they were critical to me and many others. And one of the keys that comes out of Barclay's book is the utter centrality of that other book. To them it was the book of God’s words, a notion that the world they inhabited derided even more strongly than it is derided today. Their conviction and claim was that by teaching it and living it, they were encountering and living for the God who made, saved and sustained them.

The book was and is the Bible (of course), and its key message is the good news (the Gospel) of Jesus Christ. When others turned their back on its truth as truth, the Maidens and Barclays and their ilk believed, lived, taught and shared it, and encouraged others to do the same. I was one of those so encouraged. And ultimately it is the Bible and the God who stands behind it and is revealed in it, that provides not just the markers along the way, but the very way itself. It is a way does not end in bereft goodbyes. Don’t get me wrong, goodbyes there are and will be. Oliver Barclay moved on from this life in  2013, and I'm sure there was sadness and loss. And there will be a funeral in Carlisle at some point soon, with grief and grieving. There will be goodbyes along my journey, until it too, reaches an inevitable destination. But the Gospel is so powerful that it transforms these goodbyes. Death here is the destination of one part of our journey, but it is not the terminus. For those of us who have encountered, trusted and followed Jesus, the goodbyes are accompanied by a transforming hope that takes us beyond death and the grave, through resurrection to safety. And they are then followed by a welcome to a whole new journey.

1. William Shakespeare. “As you like it”, Act II Scene VII.

2. For tributes see https://www.uk.om.org/InMemoryOf/peter-maiden 
or https://keswickministries.org/a-tribute-to-peter-maiden/

3. Oliver R Barclay. Evangelicalism in Britain 1935-1995. A personal sketch. IVP.
  https://ivpbooks.com/evangelicalism-in-britain-1935-1995-pb

Life in the Pandemic VII: Don’t panic, there’s still plenty of books to read…

Frank Zappa is quoted as having said “So many books, so little time”. But of course, for a while now, many of us have had considerably more time for reading than we bargained for, thanks to the pandemic and the lockdown. I’ve been going to work in my dining room for the last few months, so as it turns out I haven’t had a lot of extra reading time. But I have enjoyed a few notable (and eclectic) pandemic reads…so far.

As I’ve noted inside its front cover, my first lockdown read was Alistair McGrath’s biography of C.S. Lewis(1). To my mind both the author and the subject are interesting characters. McGrath is interesting because he began his academic sojourn in the world I am most familiar with. His initial calling was to science, eventually obtaining his Oxford DPhil in molecular biophysics. However, around the time he went up to Oxford, he discovered that there were other, complimentary ways of investigating and understanding the world around him, including theology. And it was to theology he turned, and in which he has made his mark. Lewis, along with other authors and scholars, helped him to understand his journey, and it is perhaps this that explains his interest in Lewis. McGrath’s approach as a biographer turns out to be quite scientific, because in order to master his subject, his approach was to immerse himself in the data - in Lewis’ case his published writings, broadcasts and, importantly, his letters. I came to Lewis in my teens, although I confess that I have still to read the Narnia books. My introduction to him was his science fiction trilogy (“Out of the Silent Planet”, “Voyage to Venus”, and “That Hideous Strength”) from which I moved on to books like “Mere Christianity” and “The Screwtape Letters”. What these don’t particularly reveal is much about the man himself. But McGrath does this forensically, although from a sympathetic standpoint. In doing so he reveals a complex character, flawed (as we all are) in many ways, navigating his way through two world wars and the cultural upheavals of the 20^th century. It is well worth a read.

Much harder work, but no less rewarding, was Peter Sanlon’s “Simply God”(2). This isn’t bedtime reading, but it addressed something that’s bothered me for a while. As readers of this blog will know, I’m interested in God. Admittedly my interest is more personal than academic, but that doesn’t mean I’m somehow exempt from doing hard thinking about Him. And one of the dangers I’ve become aware of is that I come to see Him as simply a bigger and better version of me. This is in part the age old issue of creating God in my image, instead of recognising that I’m created in His. Of course, I’m not alone. Arguably this is fallen humanity’s biggest and most devastating mistake, stretching all the way back to Eden and the Fall. And it’s pervasive. The “gods” of the ancient world were just big versions of their Canaanite, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman inventors. The “straw-God” of the new atheists is/was just a big version of what they observed/observe in humanity around them. More worryingly the God who is the object of some contemporary evangelical prayer and worship often seems to suffer from similar deficits. But Sanlon’s starting point is that this is a total misconception. Yes we are created in His image, but it is a fundamental mistake to see in this the idea that the difference between us and Him is quantitative. It turns out (and no real surprise here if you’ve been paying attention) that He is a totally different type of being. The gap between Him and us is way bigger than, and of a completely different order to, the gap between a person and a paramecium. This causes an obvious problem. How are we to understand Him if He is so different? Thankfully, it turns out that He has provided help towards exactly this end, because He wants to be known. So He has revealed things about Himself in ways that we can understand. Not being able to understand everything, shouldn't stop us from trying to understand something. Starting with God’s simplicity (which in this context has a particular meaning and significance) Sanlon investigates God as He is revealed. And there is an interesting subtext. I may be reading more into Sanlon’s writing than is there (for which I apologise in advance), but I think he’s fairly angry about the small of view of God that many of us carry around in our heads. I think he’s right to be angry about this (if he is). And to the extent that this book helped me to understand that my view of God had been inaccurate, weak and impoverished, I’m more than happy to apologise! Hard work, but a good read.

A third lockdown read that I’ll mention is completely different. It’s John Searle’s “Seeing Things as They Are”(3). This book has nothing to do with theology. Searle is a UC Berkeley philosopher, as far as I know not a believer, with little interest in theology. I discovered him through his “Chinese Room” argument which appeared in the late 70’s/early 80’s; this seeks to show why brains are not computers and why computers cannot be conscious (or at least conscious in the way that you and I are). He writes with a compelling and elegant clarity. Not that I would claim to always follow his arguments fully, I’m sure I miss a lot. I am after all, just a scientist not a philosopher. But I always get the feeling that there’s something in his arguments, and that it’s worth paying attention. “Seeing..” is an attempt to explain consciousness, in this case the kind of consciousness that is involved in the process of perception. While many regard consciousness as a mystery (and some have argued that it is a mystery that can’t be solved), for Searle there is no mystery, once we think about it clearly enough. The mystery results from confusing categories, and holding on to philosophical baggage and bad arguments from the past. This one’s been keeping me going for a while. So quite handy in a pandemic.

And as if this were not enough already, I’ve just ordered my holiday reads. A similarly eclectic bunch including Stephen Westaby’s “The Knife’s Edge”, George Zuckerman’s “The Greatest Trade Ever Made”, and on the theological front Peter Hick’s “Evangelicals and Truth”. So many books. But then the pandemic isn’t over.

1.       McGrath A (2013) “C.S. Lewis: A Life”. Hodder & Stoughton.

2.       Sanlon P (2014) “Simply God”. IVP.

3.       Searle JR (2015) “Seeing Things As They Are”. Oxford University Press.