Part of something bigger…..

This weekend, we here in this United Kingdom are celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee. She is our longest reigning monarch, celebrating 70 years of faithful service. While the anniversary actually fell on 6^th February, this is the weekend of the holidays, pageants, parties, a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s, and so on. She is a remarkable woman, has been a remarkable head of state, and that is why many are reflecting (and remarking) on both her role and her rule. Among them was Matthew Parris in today’s Times. I’ve mentioned before my liking for Parris’ columns. But now he’s beginning to worry me.

He begins his column discussing termites of all things, because they illustrate the power of the collective. This leads him on to the human and national collectivism that was demonstrated in the pandemic. But that was a moment of coming together quite out of character with times in which division and dissension have been, and are, to the fore. What therefore can unite us Brits? It is this that brings him to her Majesty, and her role as not just a figurehead, but as a powerful uniting figure. And her appeal is, well, remarkable. Even republicans find her, if not the institution of monarchy, admirable. Interestingly Michelle O’Neil, the First Minister Elect of the Northern Ireland Assembly, wrote  to the Queen recently, expressing her admiration and gratitude. I have no doubt that she was being sincere. But remember, she is a republican who wants to see NI out of the UK and joined to the Irish Republic. The paramilitary group that gave birth to her political party murdered the Queen’s second cousin (and mentor to Prince Charles) Lord Mountbatten during the “Troubles”. O’Neill’s letter tells us something about both women, but certainly is an indication of the wide admiration that Her Majesty generates. But Parris’ main point is that this admiration also tells us something ourselves.

He asserts in his piece the following: “Like it or not, implanted within each of us is an inchoate craving for something…”. I find myself in agreement with him here. He is not claiming any original insight. His point is that we are looking for a unifying figure, we are looking for something (or someone) to “draw us together”, to bring us together into a “something bigger” beyond our individual selves. We identify the Queen as the figure who can do this, egged on by admiring commentary from abroad (even from the French President). Of course, we may be imputing to her qualities she does not in fact have. And Parris fairly points out that those often mentioned attributes of hard work and sense of duty are manifest by many other public servants who are unsung and unnoticed. We just don’t know, most of us, what she’s really like. And yet, because of the way we are apparently made, we latch on to her, and invest in her our respect, admiration and hope. Of course there is a problem. Inevitably, she is only a temporary occupant of the throne. Just this weekend, we have all been reminded of her frailty (she is after all 96 years old) as well as her remarkable reign. And this raises the question for Parris as to who comes next and whether they (or rather he) will be able to fulfil the same role. As it happens, he’s fairly optimistic.

But there is something very odd going on here. Why are we “made” with a desire to be united around someone (anyone) who can only ever succeed on a temporary and imperfect basis? He seems to be almost channelling Augustine at this point, an avowedly Christian writer whom he has certainly read. After all, Augustine opens his famous “Confessions” by writing: “..you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” (Confessions 1.1). Parris has observed our “instinctive need to be part of something bigger than ourselves” as manifest in our coalescing around our “dutiful monarch”. He can’t explain it; but Augustine could. Augustine’s point was that we were made to know the God who created us, but by nature and practice we have become estranged from Him. And yet there are these strange echoes hinting at how we really are beneath how we appear in day-to-day life. One of these is the desire to believe in and belong to something bigger than ourselves. This sort of instinct that has been derided by materialists since the dawning of the enlightenment as a myth and a frailty just will not curl up and die. It keeps popping up in strange places and phenomena. But none of the God-replacements we turn to are able to ultimately fill the hole left by our denial of Him. Some are just wholly unsuitable and harmful. Some, while good in themselves (like our Queen), and performing a legitimate function (as she has done superbly), don’t really answer our deepest longings and needs. These can only be met with and in the God who made us and sustains us.

Of course dear Matthew will have none of this. He seems to feel a need to remind us in his column that he is a “Christian atheist” as well as “an agnostic about royalty”. Both are easy to forget; he sounds fairly keen on royalty and appears to be rigging on a Christian theme. But you really can’t be any kind of Christian and an atheist without so draining and redefining the word “Christian” (which he really does spell with a capital “C”) of its meaning that it becomes useless. As an adjective I suppose the word might bear some weight, but then it only rates lower-case c. The form he uses reveals a lot. Because it is clear that its meaning rests in the one whose title it contains, and that title is highly significant. “Christ” is the Greek form of the Hebrew “Messiah” – God’s chosen servant. As it turned out, God Himself in the form of Jesus. So “Christian atheist” suggests a degree of confusion that is never nice to observe in someone of clear intelligence and insight who’s getting on. Hence my worry.

Whether recognized or not, we are part of something bigger. At its heart is not (respectfully) the Queen of the UK and Commonwealth, as amazing as she is, but the King of Kings (and Queens). She apparently recognises this, and knows that she serves in a greater kingdom for a greater King. We could all usefully learn from her example.

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.