Faith in fantasy…..

I rather like Matthew Parris, one of the columnists for The Times. He’s a thoughtful fellow, who has the good sense to share some of my prejudices (or is it the other way around?). We don’t agree about everything, but his analysis is often thought provoking, and that’s useful. Usually he comments on the political issues of the day and other ephemera. But on Saturday (behind a paywall), on the first day of a new year, and because it was the first day of a new year, he asked for forgiveness “for discussing those deeps rather than the surface storms”; he was referring to those deep, great underlying currents which “shape history”. The basic conundrum he decided to tackle was why nice people can champion wrong causes, and wrong’uns can sometimes do the right thing. This he finds perplexing. But what he really had a problem with was notions of good and evil.

His problems are, in part, due to a number of assumptions he makes. Among these is the notion that good and evil have no independent existence; the words “good” and “evil” are only adjectives and should not be used as nouns. This springs from the related notion that there is nothing outside of ourselves, by which he means explicitly (this is how he ends his column): “no demons, no Heaven, no Hell, no cosmic forces of good and evil, no battle between darkness and light”. As he claims in his final sentence “There is only us”. Along the way to this assertion however, he writes approvingly of Augustine. Now, you would find it difficult to find someone in history who would more violently disagree with his concluding statement. Augustine was only too aware of, and conceptualized, all the things that Parris claims don’t exist. He was utterly convinced that there is not only us. What Parris specifically approves of in his column is the thrust of Augustine’s statement in his “Confessions” that “I still thought that it is not we who sin, but some alien nature that sins within us” (Confession10:5). In other words there was a time when Augustine thought that he wasn’t the problem, but some power acting on him. Parris’ central claim is in agreement with this; there is no such force, no such power. Such an idea is a fantasy mainly got up by the Christians (and Muslims for good measure). There is just us, and the things we do. The real question, which he claims others persistently dodge, is why then we act as we do.

I am always intrigued when atheists, even cultured and intelligent ones, take up with approval what Christians teach. Of course, Parris can’t possibly approve of everything Augustine taught, and that’s why he misses some of the answers that are to be found in Augustine’s writing. Augustine knew he was not as he should be or as he could be. In the Confessions he recounts what happened to him as he was struggling with this, specifically with his “impure life”. Part of his struggle was that he was not able to do anything to deliver himself from the distressing condition he found himself in, any more than a drowning man can rescue himself. But he recounts how he heard a child’s voice chanting “take up and read”, which he took to be “a Divine command” to read the Bible. He immediately went off and found Paul’s letter to the Romans (which as it happens he had been reading) and read from Romans Ch13 “..put on the Lord Jesus Christ…”. The effect was stunning:  “…it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.” (Confessions 8:12). What he is recounting is one of the most famous conversions to Christianity in all of history and literature. Augustine would go on to be one of the most important Christian theologians.   

What Augustine found in Scripture was an account of how we are all marked by a bias against how the God who made us and sustains us would have us think and behave. Our wills are warped; we’ve become “wrong”. But there’s nothing we can do about this for ourselves. We need the intervention of God’s grace to bring about our rescue and that’s what Augustine experienced for himself in a Milan garden. There had been an internal battle going on, and it was resolved when Augustine accepted the grace that he was offered in Christ. But there is also an external battle going on in that there is an adversary who’s whole project is to trip us up and keep us away from the grace that would rescue us. This mixture of our nature, and both internal and external battles helps explain much of our behaviour, in both its good and bad aspects. All of this, Parris asserts, is fantasy. But his is an assertion not an argument. And the problem is that it leaves him perplexed. Denial of God, Heaven, Hell, good and evil is all well and good. But it has all the hallmarks of an unproductive approach. There is something to be explained, and this approach does nothing to explain it. What Augustine found in the pages of the Bible was a powerful explanation. Now this, in itself, doesn’t make it true. But what he then came to experience was God speaking to him personally through His word the Bible. To quote Paul in Romans again “..faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17). This is not at all about dead propositions on a page, dry and dusty arguments providing a proof in words for a particular view of good and evil. This is a combination of an objective explanation (something outside of us) and the subjective experience (something inside of us) of God speaking to us for Himself.

So if you wanted a project for 2022, one that will leave you less perplexed at the end than at the beginning (and certainly less perplexed than dear Matthew Parris) - “take up and read”. Bibles aren’t hard to find. You can get recent translations (like the NIV and ESV) free, online. And you can easily pick up analogue Bibles (probably for free) in a church nearby, or in all good bookstores (probably for cash). Or you could place your faith in Parris’ fantasy that there is only us.