The blogging year…

So, here we are. The last day of 2023. It’s been a year of 21 blog posts not counting this one. And although I confess it is a bit indulgent, this seems like a good time to review them. They cover an eclectic bunch of topics, as you might expect from the summary that follows this blog’s title: “Not quite a science blog, not quite a Bible blog, not quite a politics or family blog. Just a box into which almost anything might be thrown.” If you’ve read much of it, you can decide for yourself whether it’s been “worth a rummage in”.

Back in February (was it really only ten months ago?) I was sitting on a train from Glasgow to Edinburgh when I heard that Nicola Sturgeon had resigned. If you’re not a Scot, or don’t live in Scotland (or if you hail from almost anywhere in the US) you probably won’t understand why for many us this was a “Kennedy” moment. Of course, not only my train has moved on. Since then Nicola has been investigated and arrested (although not charged) over financial irregularities in her party, leading to undisguised glee in unionist circles, and a bit of hand-wringing amongst the nationalists in my homeland (although probably not as much as there should have been). She was of course replaced by Scotland's first Muslim “First Minister”, after an interesting SNP leadership campaign. It was interesting because it revealed once again that it is acceptable to be almost anything in politics other than a Christian who takes their faith seriously, and that for the modern UK media Christianity is rather poorly understood (see "Tolerance and the public square"). Despite religion in general playing an ever more important role in most of the world, in the UK media we still don’t “do God” very well.

We do of course do politics. We had a lot of it in 2022, but we’ve only had one Prime Minister for the whole of 2023! By and large there’s been less turmoil, which is just as well given the scale of the problems that the politicians have had to grapple with. The war in Ukraine compounded the economic shocks of the pandemic (remember that?) leading to real hardship for many families. Government did a bit (not enough for many, not the right things for others), but at the end of 2023 finds itself facing a crushing defeat in the polls in 2024. The only question appears to be how crushing? I do have the occasional twinge of sympathy for our current PM (Rishi Sunak), but then he goes and trails some potty policy to see off a threat (real or imagined) from the right wing of his party or even the right wing of the right wing. Meanwhile the Labour Party has become at least worthy of consideration as an alternative government because it has dealt with its crazy left wing. For some in Labour this about betrayal and backstabbing and the claim is that if their current leader Keir Starmer stands for anything, nobody knows what it is. But this is always the accusation laid at the door of the opposition (even by some on the same side). The time to judge will come perhaps as early as Spring 2024 when the two main parties set out their stalls. But what will perhaps be more interesting will the tone as much as the substance of the next UK general election. We like a good argument, and there are always accusations of lies and media bias. But these are usually peripheral rather than central. Argument had, election over, we get on with life. Whoever wins the election, we probably won’t have any nonsense about it being stolen, with everyone running to the courts. We are likely to be spared at least that fate.

On this side of the Atlantic our constitution, unwritten as it is, has always been about more than politics (just as well you might mutter under your breath). We officially obtained a new head of state in 2023, thanks to the coronation of King Charles III. Despite various fictitious versions of both royal history (courtesy of Netflix) and more recent royal shenanigans (courtesy of Charles’ youngest son), the reality has been steady and, as far as one can tell from the far distance, fairly sure. The coronation certainly got things off to an impressive start. And unlike our media, and most of our politicians, Charles is a profoundly religiously literate man. Given the recent apparent surge in both antisemitic and anti-Islamic crimes (the out-working on British streets of events in Israel and Gaza), having a head of state who is broadly respected by different communities can be no bad thing. Of course, even if Charles possessed the wisdom of Solomon, he would be taxed to breaking point by developments in the church of which he is the “Supreme Governor” – the Church of England. Its leadership has decided to make a fairly startling break with what it is signed up to protect and teach, changing their basic doctrine while denying that they are doing any such thing. While usually what happens is that the very heterogenous theological views that comprise the C of E find some way of remaining in a more-or-less working relationship, perhaps not this time. More will be revealed in the year ahead.

At the heart of that particular tussle is theology (for once), which is of course now “my thing”. I attended my first theological conference at the start of 2023, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Not that theology, at least in its academic form, is uniformly impressive (as I discussed back in July). But I’ve really enjoyed two years of study with Union School of Theology, completing my Masters dissertation (which you can read here if you're so inclined) back in September. Graduation next summer will, I hope, be a highlight of 2024. But the study doesn’t stop. One of my Christmas presents was the Greek New Testament. So 2024 will be full of declensions and tenses as I work to get the point where I can begin to read the New Testament’s human authors in their original language. Of course, God’s word is not bound by language, and you can hear what the Divine Author has to say just as well in English translation.

And what of my former “thing” science? Well, as an institution it’s been struggling a bit as I blogged in September and November. Some of this is the cumulative impact of a culture that has long maintained that there is no such thing as truth, perhaps combined with the impact of the post-modern view that the claim that there is a truth with demands everyone's assent is an illegitimate power game. So we now live surrounded by a morass of relativism and conspiracy, when even something as basic as the sexual dimorphism of humanity is flatly denied. In this atmosphere, when scientists make mistakes, or perpetrate outright fraud (which still happens relatively rarely), this is jumped on to show that, like every other human activity, science is flawed. The difficulty is that this is of course true, to the extent that science is a human activity with all that this implies. And yet it remains the best way, bar none, for answering certain kinds of questions – questions about what “is”. For questions about what “ought to be”, well for that we have theology (other humanities disciplines are available).

So there you have it. That’s the 22^nd and final blog post of 2023. Now, what will take my fancy next year?

Mourning Christianity (or at least its decline)

Reports of the death of Christianity, like those of Mark Twain’s death, have been greatly exaggerated. Reports of the death of “Christian Britain” are not so much exaggerated as misconceived, given that the adjective “Christian” is usually so emptied of its meaning that it provides no useful description of the noun “Britain”. But you would be forgiven for thinking that something seismic is going on if you had been reading the Times of late. Last year it went to town when the UK Office of National Statistics published its analysis of the latest census figures for England and Wales, reporting that less that 50% of the population (actually 46.2%) self identified as Christian. This prompted headlines such as “End of an era for Christian Britain” (The Times, Nov 30^th, 2022). At the time I commented on similar reports in the Guardian, which has the great virtue of not being behind a paywall.

As an aside, it is worth pointing out that between then and now we have had the SNP leadership election. That is relevant because one of the candidates had made clear publicly that she was a Christian (in the Biblical as opposed to popular sense) and that this motivated and affected her politics, resulting in Christianity and politics grabbing the headlines for a time. This led to quite a furore in Scottish politics which revealed, among other things, the complete inability of the media, as well as a fair proportion of the political class, to report such matters and discuss the issues raised with any great accuracy (let alone consistency). I discussed this at the time. There were honourable exceptions of course including, in the Times, Matthew Parris (see his column “In politics, there’s no such thing as private faith”, March 4^th, 2023). Mind you I was surprised to read in that particular column that “Most of our Prime Ministers have been practising Christians”. Church goers, probably. Intelligent, educated people from a time and of a class who obtained a bit of Bible knowledge and could conjure up the odd quote when necessary; some of them, certainly. Decent human beings trying to do an almost impossible and complex job in always tricky circumstances, fair enough. But using “Christian” in this context would again require some definitional work to be undertaken (although not now – this is an aside).

For it is necessary to return to the Times, and some of its output this last week. It has been reporting on the results of a survey that it conducted into the views of Church of England clergy (starting with “Britain is no longer a Christian country, say frontline clergy”, published Tuesday, 29^th August). Such an exercise is not without merit. After all, the Church of England is a large, wealthy and culturally important English institution. It is in the midst of debating and seeking to come to a mind on important and divisive issues. The particular issues, let it be noted, are of wide, political and cultural significance. From the data returned in the survey various conclusion were drawn and boldly asserted. “Two thirds of Anglican clergy think that..”, “A majority of priests want…” (apparently what the culture wants). Others have commented on the survey and its reporting, and a highly readable critique of it can be found on Ian Paul’s “Psephizo” blog. Unlike me, he was actually sent the survey, and has interesting things to say about some of the questions asked.

As is common in our newspapers today (and the media more widely), the conclusions come well before the methodology and the raw numbers, although to be fair both are eventually provided. This is the opposite of how things are presented in (most) scientific papers. If you are going to draw sound conclusions from such an exercise, then how you go about obtaining the data is critical. But newspapers (and even Times) appear to think that such information is a tiresome detail. It has to be included for form’s sake, but who is going to read that far into the article? In this instance (as ever) how they obtained their numbers is revealing, as is the fuller picture of their numbers that the methodology provides.

According to last Tuesday’s article: “The Times selected 5,000 priests at random from among those with English addresses in Crockford’s Clerical Directory of Anglican Clergy and received 1,436 responses, analysing data from the 1,185 respondents still serving.” According to the Church of England there are about 20 000 active clergy (although exactly what “active clergy” means is complicated). So the Times started with a potential sample of 25% of the population it was interested in. Not entirely unreasonable. But while it sounds sensible to pick addresses at random, this doesn’t mean that the resulting sample will be able to provide anything like a snapshot of the clergy as a whole. In fact, as a population the Church of England clergy is highly structured, breaking into clearly defined sub-populations, often along lines related to some of the issues the Times was interested in, and there’s no way to control for this, although it might have been possible to account for it in the analysis. It doesn’t appear that a weighted analysis was done, even if they had the numbers to do it. In any case, 28.7% of their initial sample responded (actually not bad for a survey of this kind); of which 82.5% provided analysable data (we’re not told the problem with the other 17.5%). So the reporting is based on the views of 5.9% (approximately; 1185/20000) of the Church of England's active clergy.

One can understand why this number is, if not obscured, not particularly prominent. On the basis of this rather thin sliver of opinion, we are told there has been an “historic shift on gay marriage and questions of sex” – suspiciously in exactly the direction favoured by the culture at large. One proponent of such views, now no longer himself ministering within within the C of E, was happy to proclaim that “This is absolutely huge”. But it really isn’t. I assume the gentleman concerned was unaware of the methodology that had been used, only of the conclusions that had been reached. Do the results of this survey indicate any real change of view within the Church of England? We have no way of knowing. But clearly there is a constituency who would dearly love the Times’ reporting to contribute momentum to a drift in a particular direction.

To jump from either the results of the last census, or the results of the Times’ survey of clergy in one particular Christian grouping, to conclusions about those who make up the body of Christ (i.e. the Church in England), is to jump to unwarranted conclusions. And it is a tad parochial (no pun intended). It is to confuse the visible church in one part of the world, always a mixed and often an apparently weak body, with the invisible church, a graced and glorious body of saints worldwide known certainly only to Jesus Himself. The latter group is in rude good health, although I wouldn’t expect this to be reported any time soon in a newspaper any of us have heard of.

To sightly misquote an anonymous funeral poem “Do not weep for [us] for [we] have not gone. Not yet that is. But one day, perhaps soon. 

Turbulent Bishops (with apologies to Henry II)

In his displeasure at Thomas Becket in 1170, Henry II is reputed to have cried “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest”, leading to some of his more impulsive Knights paying the Archbishop a visit, resulting in his untimely demise. Even in the absence of outraged monarchs, the Church of England continues to encounter turbulence, although not (thankfully) with a similar violent outcome. This time it is the Bishop of Oxford who has been stirring the pot (one too many metaphors). For those not familiar with the continuing agonies of the established church in England, it has been discussing issues of identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage in a process called “Living in Love and Faith”. It has come to the point where the Bishops are meeting to agree concrete proposals to put to their governing General Synod; change is in the air. Officially, the Church of England currently holds to “traditional” (i.e largely Biblical) views of sexuality, gender and marriage. The broader culture, of course, does not. Hence the “traditional” view is pitted against what is widely regarded as a “progressive” view. This is seen as a problem in that not only is it uncomfortable, but is said by some to be unsustainable. Something has to give.

It is worth saying that it would be surprising if the views of Christians, seeking to follow a Saviour whom the world saw fit to crucify, were ever entirely compatible with the views of that same world. However, for a long time broadly Biblically-based values and attitudes have so influenced the Western World (an issue famously explored in Tom Holland’s “Dominion”), that tensions have tended to be at the margins or under the surface (with the occasional glaring exception). But, with increasing speed the values of the culture which we inhabit have been diverging from anything remotely Biblical. Hence problems have arisen, among them what should the church’s response be to this divergence and how should it decide. And this brings us back to the Bishop of Oxford, Stephen Croft.

In the middle of the final part of a process involving discussions among the Church of England’s Bishops from November 2022 to January 2023, Bishop Croft decided that it was time for him to make his own thinking clear and public. So he published a pamphlet entitled “Together in Love and Faith: Personal Reflections and Next Steps for the Church” (downloadable here) in which he concentrated on the issue of same-sex relationships, and in particular the attitude the Church of England should take towards same-sex partnerships. Some have questioned his objectives. Others have rather rolled their eyes at another bishop seeking to subvert the very teaching he promised to uphold and defend. But his pamphlet is interesting. It is in part a description of a journey from an evangelical position in which Scripture is the starting point and final authority, including in areas as difficult, fraught and contentious as human sexuality, to what he calls “a more affirming position” on same-sex relationships. It is a careful, thoughtful and I have no doubt sincere attempt to argue for that position. And he does it claiming that he remains an evangelical, retaining “a high view of the authority of Scripture”.

There have been lots of responses, from both those who share his newly adopted objective (that the Church of England abandons its currently orthodox position and move to recognize same-sex relationships as on a par with heterosexual relationships), and those who oppose it. Some of the opposition is from “traditionists” who look at 2000 years of church teaching and practice and see that the Bishop’s position stands this on its head. For them this is sufficient basis for rejecting his conclusions. But much of the opposition (unsurprisingly) has come from those Anglicans who claim, along with the Bishop, to be evangelicals, recognizing Scripture as the source and standard of Church teaching and practice (while taking note of 2000 years of teaching and practice). Perhaps the most thorough and penetrating response has come from a member of the Bishop’s own diocese, Vaughan Roberts. To be fair to the Bishop, Roberts’ response it is as effective as it is because the Bishop gave him prior sight of his pamphlet before it was published. And the Bishop has praised both the tone and content of Robert’s response. All very Anglican. But both cannot be right in their conclusions. Part of their discussion is about practical steps the Church of England might have to take to retain both of them within its compass. But there is a more fundamental, and familiar, issue that quickly comes to the fore. 

Vaughan Roberts is no naïve Biblicist. He is a thoughtful and experienced pastor and Bible teacher, who leads one of the largest evangelical Anglican churches in Oxford. And crucially, he has personally has had to grapple with issues of human sexuality not just in the abstract, but personally. Once again in this paper he is very open about his own struggles and experience. Where he agrees with his Bishop, he makes it clear (and there are areas of agreement). But he is surely correct in spotting what has really changed for the Bishop. It is something the Bishop is also fairly clear about. Notwithstanding warm words about Scripture, he actually prioritises something above it. For him, Scripture is trumped by experience. We do not interpret our experience in the light of Scripture, we use experience to interpret Scripture. Where the demands and implications of Scripture lead to difficult and painful conclusions, including some that might mean careful and perhaps painful readjustment of our thinking and behaviour, it is legitimate to reinterpret Scripture. In fact, we probably should. For how could painful change be what God demands of us?  For the Bishop, in the light of the painful and unjust experiences of some of those whose sexual identity is different to Biblical demands and norms, we should find a way to alter our interpretation of Scripture to avoid the pain. This is simply the loving thing to do. And so in his pamphlet the Bishop goes to considerable lengths to do exactly this. As Roberts points out this is “an essentially liberal, rather than evangelical, approach”.  

All of which means that we have been here before. It is the old claim that Scripture is not the revelation of God, and does not have any authority over and above us. Authority lies somewhere else. For the Enlightenment it was in reason; in the 21^st century it is in experience. And so the current impasse that the Church of England finds itself in boils down to this familiar issue of authority. There is much more in Robert’s response beyond this, and all of it worth reading and thinking about. But why should the rest of us be bothered?

There are practical reasons for being bothered about the state of the Church of England; there's its infrastructure for one, with churches up and down the country. Then there are those links of fellowship between evangelicals (in the Roberts sense) in the Church of England, and those of us happily outside of it. We should not be, and are not, indifferent to the pressure they are under and the struggle on which they are embarked. It is tough. But what is at stake is truth, and truth always matters. There is such a thing as “Neuhaus’ law”:  where orthodoxy is optional, it will soon or later be proscribed. And that matters to us all.