On “Losing my religion”….

I am a mandolin player. Or perhaps more accurately I should say that I play the mandolin. On this side of the Anglo-Saxon Atlantic, mandolin playing is mainly limited to folk music, although across the Chanel it has long been known as a classical instrument (Vivaldi wrote at least two mandolin concertos). In the US the mandolin has a long and treasured place in country and bluegrass music. But as far as I know there is only one rock/pop mandolin riff that is widely known. Back in the ‘90’s R.E.M. had a hit with the song “Losing My Religion” which starts with it. The song and the accompanying video went on to win multiple awards. You might think that the song had something to do with religion. Perhaps a celebratory atheistic anthem of its newly recognised irrelevance or a wistful retrospective of a now forgotten childhood heritage. But apparently not. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe who wrote the lyric has said that it was actually about unrequited love: “..what I was pulling from was being the shy wallflower who hangs back at the party or at the dance and doesn’t go up to the person that you’re madly in love with and say ‘I’ve kind of got a crush on you, how do you feel about me?’”. Doesn’t take away from the brilliant mandolin riff of course. In any case it turns out religion isn't quite what you might think.

That’s interesting because it often isn’t. The meanings given to the word have changed over time, as often happens. And even if there really is a thing being labelled (in the sense that we also give names to non-things like purple spotted unicorns) this is also likely to change through time and and over space (i.e. being different in different places and spaces). So it is sometimes genuinely difficult to know what is meant when we talk (or even sing) about religion, lost or otherwise. There is nothing new or unique in this; try looking up the etymological history of “nice” – you’ll be surprised. Even broad categories used to identify obvious and necessary boundaries turn out in some important cases to be recent innovations that are neither obvious nor necessary. The rhetorical drawing of contrasts is therefore also tricky. The idea that the categories of “natural” and “supernatural” have always been with us, and we’ve always been clear about what these categories are, crops up in many debates. Indeed it is the supernatural, as distinct from religion or God, that was Dawkins’ main target in “The God Delusion”. He clearly thought he knew what he meant, and that his readers did too.

But the categories of natural and supernatural are relatively recent. And around them there has been more than a little myth-making particularly once they transformed into “-isms” claimed to competing with each other. This particular framing (although not the words themselves) appeared late on in the 19^th century promoted by, among others, T.H. Huxley. Huxley and his ilk then read these categories back into history. Promising (in their terms) pre-Socratic philosophers were identified as being early stalwarts taking their plucky stance against surrounding supernatural beliefs and religious practices. A line of heroes was then traced through that most influential of ancient philosophers, Aristotle. And so down to contemporary debates where science, rationality and naturalism were pitted against religion, faith and supernaturalism, with the implication that we all know which side of the line we (and the intellectual greats of the past) must stand. Except it was never thus and is not so now.

The Greek philosophers, of all schools and stages, were clear that the divine was involved with all aspects of human life and thought, whether for good or ill. For them, “natural” inevitably implied, among other things, divine activity. And Greek science (a much wider activity than what is meant in English by the word today) showed little sign of progress or development away from such notions. Arguably it was actually the rise of Christianity which in some of its forms began to remove the divine from many of the areas of life it was formerly thought to inhabit. Many of the innovators who began to give science the form it has today, from Bacon on, made no great distinction between their thinking as scientists (not a word they would have understood in our sense) and theological thinking. Investigating the world with the tools available was an investigation of the works of God. The success of science  was, to many, not the success of naturalism in the face of supernatural resistance, but actually progress in illuminating and understanding the works of the Creator. No contest here. But something does thereafter seem to have been lost.

A broadly Biblical understanding of everything there was and is was what led to (or at least was the context of) the development of science as we know it today. But a catastrophic narrowing of science seems to have taken place, particularly as it became professionalised and institutionalised. The historian Peter Harrison recently put it like this “Whereas the sciences are sometimes said to be based in curiosity, from the mid-twentieth century that curiously rarely extended to fundamental questions about the metaphysical foundations of science or the intelligibility of the natural world” (Some New World, p328). As a matter of history those “metaphysical” foundations were thought to be Biblical by the majority of the practitioners from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It was Huxley and others, relatively recently, who set up various false antitheses. And they were then highly successful in evangelising for this particular view of our intellectual and scientific history. Once constructed in their terms, loosing the supernatural, indeed losing religion, was not the loss of anything of value. Indeed, it was seen as a necessary and progressive step.

The problem is that we are now living with the consequences of this loss of “who knows what”. And it actually turns out that the most serious consequences are not for religion (in the modern sense) as much for science, politics and culture. Religion appears to be going from strength to strength all over the world. But particularly in Western Europe and the US, wistful noises are now being made in the oddest of corners for what has been lost. And science itself seems particularly to be suffering. 

So if you thought REM was celebrating the loss of religion in the sense of losing the religious, think again. And even if you had been right, it would probably not be something worth celebrating.

Reading for 2025 (so far...)

 

How long does it take for a tradition to become a tradition? I have no idea. But I think I'll stick with one that began only twelve months ago, and commence the blogging year by mentioning some of the books that it is my intention to read in 2025. Some are part of ongoing projects and there are two complete series in view. And no doubt that there will be other "one-offs" that I’ve yet to encounter.

At the bottom of the pile (and still foundational in more than the obvious sense) is my Tyndale House Greek New Testament. The acutely observant with longish memories will remember that this was also at the bottom of last year's pile, but it was there perhaps more in hope than expectation. I had embarked on learning NT Greek with the help of resources from Union. At the time I thought I might eventually embark on further, formal language study. But alas my progress was rather slower than I had hoped (and slower than was necessary to undertake the courses I had in mind). However, by last September I had made sufficient progress to join a local group that met online once a week to read and translate the NT. So, for an hour each Wednesday morning that’s what we’ve been doing. Reading our way through John’s Gospel, there have already been some lightbulb moments. I confess that some are a bit nerdy; a verb in a tense freighted with meaning that is missed in the English. Others have come as a result of feeling the full force of the language John reports Jesus as using (albeit in his translation from Aramaic to Greek). The clarity with which Jesus claims not merely to be a prophet but God Himself was not lost on His original hearers who, in John 8:59, are literally ready to stone Him to death (ie they’ve got to the stone picking-up stage). But while this is clear in English translation, Jesus constantly taking up the language of Exodus 3:14 (I am) comes through loud and clear in the Greek. In the same section at least one other person uses the same words (once), but the context and repetition on Jesus’ part emphasise His claim.

My strategy for our sessions is to try to do several verses of translation each day over the preceding week, allowing me to spot difficult vocabulary or grammar (of which there’s still a lot) ahead of time. I am still very much in the foothills, but the Tyndale “Reader’s Addition” helpfully lists less familiar words in footnotes at the bottom of each page, meaning that one doesn’t constantly have to refer to a separate lexicon or the interweb, thus saving lots of time. This year I’ve also been trying to read a couple of verses in Greek from my daily Bible reading schedule. And to keep moving forward I thought I’d better try and advance my understanding of the grammar beyond the basics covered last year. To some extent this develops from the reading, for it quickly becomes clear that basic rules are, well, basic. As with any language (and English must be a nightmare in this respect) such rules are often more broken than kept. So on my pile is Mathewson and Emig’s “Intermediate Greek Grammar”. While admittedly not what you would call “ a right riveting read” this is none-the-less useful for understanding some of the rule bending and breaking that actually occurs with the language “in the wild”. 

What I did have last year (although I didn’t discus it in the relevant post) was some serious theological reading - Calvin’s Institutes (edited by McNeill, expertly and entertainingly translated by Ford Lewis Battles). The “Institutes” represented some of the first “proper” theology I read when I began the MTh at Union. I had of course heard of the man before, and had enough reformed friends to have heard of the Institutes. But I had never actually read Calvin (and now I wonder if my friends ever had either). I initially approached the two substantial volumes of the McNeill edition with some trepidation. After all the Institutes were originally written in the 16^th century, within a particular context and with some fairly specific polemical targets. I had already been exposed to some of Barth’s “Church Dogmatics” which was not an entirely happy experience. I needn’t have worried. The combination of Calvin’s clarity of organisation and thought (and his wit) on the one hand, and Battle’s skill as a translator on the other, made it an intellectual and spiritual treat. Even for those not of a reformed disposition, there is much to learn and admire in Calvin’s efforts. But that was last year. I wanted to continue reading theology, but what next? Providentially I picked N.T. Wright’s five volume “Christian Origins and the Question of God”. I say providentially because, a bit like Calvin (or was it Battles?) Wright has a way with words. I managed to get started on Vol 1 early, and finished it last week. It is written with verve and wit, but without sacrificing depth and thoroughness (and providing plenty of footnotes and an extensive bibliography). There are those occasions when one encounters writing dealing with difficult or potentially dense issues, but the author does so in way that provides assurance that they “know their onions”. Having learned lots about the Judaism that provided a key element of the context for Jesus’ arrival, life, death and resurrection, I’m now enjoying the second volume which concentrates on Jesus Himself. The plan is to complete all five volumes this year. So far, I have no reason to believe this will be a chore.

To digress from the theology for a moment (but not as far as you might think), I also plan to read Hillary Mantell’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy. Now it is true that she won the 2009 Booker Prize for the fist book in the trilogy, and this would normally scare me off. The books that critics deem worthy of awards and the books that I enjoy reading usually fall into two distinct and mutually exclusive categories. Prize-winning prose is usually not my thing. But I was was impressed with the BBC’s adaptation of the books, and enjoyed Mark Rylance’s portrayal of the central character, Thomas Cromwell. So I took the plunge and made the trilogy one of my 2024 Christmas asks. Some kind relative duly obliged and this has been my bedtime reading throughout January. Bedtime it may be, but “light” it is not. I’ll spare you the review, but I will be persevering. And the story of Cromwell (if not the man himself) is growing on me. I have two and a bit books to make up my mind.

Towards the top of the pile is reading for another “project”. I completed my PhD at the end of the 1980’s, and spent a good part of the 90’s in the Centre for Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. These were heady days in what we’ll call the “neurosciences” (really a collection of fields and techniques all aimed at understanding the operations of the brain and nervous system). As a subject it was reaching maturity and new tools, particularly those for imaging the brain in awake human subjects (ie while they were doing things like thinking), were becoming routinely available. The new techniques and results had not gone unnoticed by philosophers, who were beginning to think that there might be light at the end of the very long, very dark mind/brain tunnel. It was around this time that “eliminative materialism” came into its own with loud and confident statements made, asserting that things like beliefs were the product of a soon-to-be-refuted and redundant “folk psychology”. Soon we would all get used to the (correct) idea that beliefs were the phlogiston of the neurosciences and they would be properly replaced by talk about brain states. “I” am merely my brain and have no more basis in reality than the immaterial God who has already been routed and driven from polite public discourse. What I didn’t know at the time was that this was (of course) only a very partial view of the state of the philosophical (never mind the theological) world.

So my aim is to now read some of the rejoinders I should have read then. To be fair I was doing other things at the time like making my own modest contribution to trying to understand vision and eye movement. This time round I’m also specifically interested in the serious theology as well as the philosophy involved, because it turns out there is quite a lot of it. Including (as can bee seen in my pile) Barth. Actually Cortez's "Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies" has been very helpful on that front. Suffice to say that already I’m discovering that time has not been kind to the eliminativists, and that’s even before one begins to take on board what Divine revelation has to say about the constitution of human beings, mental and otherwise.

It turns out God has much to say about us as well as Himself.

“Was Jesus a Jew?” (and other matters)….

I would like to stress that the above question is not mine, but one that was put to me this week. It was not asked by someone trying to be smart or make a point or start a debate. They simply did not know the answer and were curious. Being unclear about Jesus origins is perhaps forgivable given centuries of (mainly) European “Christian” art that has tended to portray Him as relatively light skinned, with shiny hair and a very well trimmed beard. Centuries of creating Him in our own image, in the same way that fallen humanity always does with God. The question cropped up in the context of a conversation about Christmas as we shared our mutual dislike of many of its contemporary features. Although this was, and for some of us still is, an opportunity to celebrate the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity (the Word being made flesh as John puts it), Christmas has all but completely morphed into a secular celebration of general niceness, bonhomie and wistfulness. And in this form it is built around various myths.

I am fairly sure that my friend is sure that these myths are myths. Small children, should any be in the vicinity, should perhaps be ushered out of the room at this point – you have been warned. But we all realise that the idea that the presents that appear on the morning of 25^th December, often laid under a fir or pine tree (whether real or synthetic) are not placed there by a stranger in a red suit and white beard on the basis of merit accumulated in the previous twelve months. He who shall remain nameless (but about whom many a parent lies to their offspring) is made up, as is the historical hinterland often attributed to him. Other inventions that appear at this time of year include three wise men and inns with sympathetic inn-keepers but no room. Given the accretion of this mythology, and the widespread Biblical illiteracy that is a feature of the culture, it is not really a surprise to find doubts arising about that other central figure of Christmas, and still the star of many a school nativity, Jesus.

Of course one can investigate who Jesus is, and I would argue that any educated person should. A sensible place to start would be the Biblical accounts of His birth. But here we find something that seems rather strange (as well as lots of things that are contested). Only two of four Gospel writers (Matthew and Luke) include birth narratives in their accounts at all. Mark (who was probably first to produce a Gospel) and John (who probably wrote after the others) both begin their accounts with Jesus’ baptism, when he was aged approximately 30. The most detailed birth narrative occurs in Luke, but he provides almost as much detail about the birth of Jesus' relative John the Baptist (whose birth we never celebrate). And yet for two or three months of every year, thanks to the relentless focus of advertisers and media, you might think that Jesus’ birth is a key event we should focus on. Apparently this was neither the view of 50% of the Gospel writers or, for that matter, the early Church.

For the first two or three centuries of the Church’s existence, more prominence was given to Jesus' baptism (celebrated in the Feast of the Epiphany in January) and His death and resurrection (celebrated at Easter – in spring, and for a while a literally moveable feast). In part this was because birthdays in general were yet to take on their modern significance. So it took a while for consensus to emerge as to when Jesus was born. And at the time there were much more important issues that had to be settled. Besides, precise dates were not much of a thing in the ancient world. So initially, estimates of His month of birth ranged from November to March. Only gradually was December 25^th adopted (at least for liturgical purposes) in part so that a celebration of Jesus birth might displace more dubious pagan celebrations.

Perhaps this Biblical and early Church disinterest in focussing on Jesus birth was also because while it was obviously necessary for what came next, and while it was surrounded by a number of heavy hints as to His significance, it was in some ways profoundly ordinary. And concentration on it, to the exclusion of the rest of what we’re told about Him, runs the risk of “perpetual baby syndrome”. In our minds He forever remains a cute and suspiciously quiet (according to “Away in a manger”) infant. Yet beyond his birth we need to understand the life He led, what He said and did, and not miss the significance of the death He died. However you view these things, cute would hardly be an adequate description. What He did outraged and astonished in equal measure. What He claimed, explicitly as well as implicitly, needs to be carefully weighed. For these are not mere matters of the historical record. The critical call that Jesus made (and makes) is not so much that we must reckon with His birth, but that His life and death having continuing personal as well as cosmic significance. And of this is validated by His resurrection perhaps the most significant event in history, at least so far.

Questions like the one my friend was asking can be answered. We can certainly establish where Jesus was born, and the circumstances surrounding His birth. We can be sure of His ethnicity (He was a Jew), and His heritage (with regard to His human descent He was from the tribe of Judah, though the kingly line of David), and see how his coming fulfilled ancient promises and patterns. I contend that none of this is myth, nor is it merely history, and all of it is significant. By all means enjoy contemplating His birth, but don’t get stuck.

Personally, I comfort myself with the thought that although it’s almost Christmas, Easter is just around the corner.

"Of the making of books......"

A new year, and a new pile of books has appeared (as if by magic). It is just a little pile for the moment. One of them is part of a longer term project and I won’t really be able to tackle it properly for a while, but I was being pushed for Christmas present suggestions. Another is a holdover from 2023 which I’ve nearly finished reading. The rest are the “next” in the queue to be read. I get the feeling that the writer of Ecclesiastes was a bit ambivalent abut books, even at a time when there were far fewer of them about (see what he has to say about them in Ecc 12:12). These days all sorts of things get published. Just because something appears in a book (or is published in a journal as I used to stress to students) doesn’t guarantee good sense, wisdom or helpfulness. But I’m reasonably hopeful this pile will get my reading year off to a good start.

At the bottom of the pile is the Tyndale House Greek New Testament (Reader’s Edition, published by Crossway). Foundational to reading, and more importantly to understanding, is what God has to say. He sets the agenda and provides the framework. God is a speaking God, and although not knowable apart from his revelation of himself, what he says is understandable in any language. We all think using a framework that consists of a cloud of background assumptions and commonplaces. It’s important to know where it comes from. I want mine to depend on what God has said in his word, the Bible. What was written by the human authors of the Bible was obviously written down in a language other than English. However, it looses none of its power when translated, whether into English or any other language. This was a major bone of contention at the time of the Reformation, although the issue was really who had the authority to interpret Scripture. Ordinary believers were claimed not to be able or allowed to interpret it for themselves, so why let them read it in their own language? There is also a contrast here with Islam. The Koran only carries authority when read and cited in Arabic. As Pickthall wrote of his own English translation “The Quran cannot be translated. [This] is only an attempt to present the meaning of the Quran … in English. It can never take the place of the Quran in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so.”

So why bother learning New Testament Greek? Because not everything is equally clear and straightforward as the New Testament itself says (e.g. see 2 Peter 3:16), and all translation involves a degree of interpretation. To get into the mind of the writers in their own language is to gain a useful new perspective. Therefore, rather later than I probably should have, I’ve embarked on learning New Testament Greek. It won’t be a quick or easy process. But I hope to have completed the basics over the next eight months or so, and then there’s the possibility of progressing to some of the language modules offered by Union where I did my MTh. Perhaps by the year’s end, I’ll be able to read the odd verse here or there.

The holdover is Barclay’s “Paul & the Gift”; I started it last month (i.e. last year). It takes a bit of reading and illustrates why getting on top of NT Greek can be so useful. Barclay explores Paul’s use of the idea of a gift (linked with concepts like grace and mercy). You might wonder why this is needed given that the writing in question has been around for two thousand years or so. My view is that the big picture is fairly clear and easily understood. In my natural state I cannot work my way into acceptability with a God who is perfect, holy and just. But neither can he just “let me off” as an act of “simple” mercy – that would be outrageously unjust; he would become something less than he is. And if he just lets me off, what about you? That looks suspiciously capricious as well as unjust. So instead he does something daring in the extreme not to say surprising. He takes my punishment on himself (in the person of Jesus) and then he lets me off. Turns out it is simple. But then again it isn’t really. This leaves all sorts of issues hanging. Some of the complications are to do with how Paul discusses all of this especially in his letters to the Romans and the Galatians (hence the usefulness of the Greek, which Barclay quotes and discusses in detail). Some of the issues are to do with how Paul’s writing relates to the Judaism of his day, and how this is to be understood (something that changes from time to time). And some of it has to do with the ways we think today about gift and grace, which turns out to be different to what these things meant in the ancient world. All well worth exploring in more detail, which Barclay certainly does.

Sounds a bit heavy. Much shorter is Peter Williams “The Surprising Genius of Jesus” which is primarily a look at what is commonly called the “parable of the prodigal”. Williams, now principal of Tyndale House, was involved in producing the Greek NT I’m looking forward to being able to read, and is an expert in Greek (and other things). So this will again be about the specifics of the language Jesus uses and how he tunes it to the precise context of his original audience. William's point is that this is done with such skill that Jesus demonstrates not just the genius of an expert story teller but the genius of the original author; he is of course both.

I have some philosophy/philosophical theology in my pile In the form of Plantinga’s “Knowledge and Christian Belief” and Tyson’s “A Christian Theology of Science” (which I mentioned briefly previously). How do we know what we think we know? Plantinga is perhaps best known for his book “Warranted Christian Knowledge”, but the book in my pile is later, shorter and perhaps an easier read. No doubt to the bemusement of that rarest of beasts the “new atheist”, Christian belief (along with lots of other wild and wacky stuff) is potentially respectable again. This may be the product of a culture that has privatised belief and elevated the principle of tolerance to totemic status. If sincerely held belief is beyond criticism (at least when privately held and not inflicted on others), then this must apply to Christian beliefs. Where such beliefs raise their head in public, say in academic debate, they should be given a polite hearing, if only to be dismissed as just someone else’s “truth”. Tyson seeks to give priority to Christian belief (or at least theology) over even science. That this should be at all entertained is very different to the attitudes I was exposed to as a student forty years ago. It was taken for granted that progress, particularly in science, meant we could dispense with certain types of belief which were only for the weak-minded. How things have changed, at least superficially.

Some history next: a two volume biography of Selina, the Countess of Huntingdon (obtained from the excellent Kernaghan's bookshop) and Richard Turnbull’s biography of Shaftesbury (“Shaftesbury: The Great Reformer”). Selina was an influential participant in the “Great Awakening” of the eighteenth century. Although almost forgotten now, she was one of the great supporters of George Whitefield and a number of other prominent preachers. What the Awakening achieved is disputed by historians, but arguably is saved Great Britain from the kind of revolution that afflicted France at the end of the eighteenth century, and laid the basis for major social reforms in the nineteenth. Some of these were implemented by Shaftesbury, hence the idea of reading about the two together. I confess that I’m looking forward to these as “light relief” meaning no disrespect to their authors. I love reading history and had the privilege of studying the history and theology of evangelicalism with Richard Turnbull not that long ago. He was kind enough to give us his copies of his book, so I’ve felt morally obliged to read it for a while. I’m sure it will be a treat.

Finally on the pile is John Wyatt’s account of his friendship with John Stott (“Transforming Friendship”). John Stott was probably almost as influential as Shaftesbury but at a very different time and in a very different way. I was attracted to this book because at its heart is a friendship, the topic of my dissertation. That was dry, clipped, academic, referenced – it was theory. Wyatt’s book is of interest because it is about personal practicality. An interesting contrast.

So, these are the books that make up my initial pile for 2024. Looks like a good reading year already.

Keswick 2023.1 I’m probably beginning to repeat myself

This definitely isn’t the first time I’ve commented on the Keswick Convention (last year's posts begin here), and it probably won’t be the last. This is where we’ve spent a week each July for the last few years. Our motivations for coming here are multiple rather than single, and mixed rather than single minded. It is generally accepted that Keswick is pleasant and nestles in a spectacular setting (the English Lake District). It is only just “up the road” from where we live, so we don’t have to navigate the horrors of a summer airport or spend more than a couple of hours in a car. Even if there wasn’t a convention Keswick  would still be a popular spot (as it is for the forty-nine weeks of the year that the Convention isn’t on). There’s plenty of pleasant walks, water sports, tours (on and off of the water), interesting eateries and coffee shops, local(ish) literary history (i.e. William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter) and much more besides. Nice place for a break. But we can enjoy all this and there’s the Convention too! Since 1875 it has managed to attract Christians from a range of backgrounds to spend time thinking about stuff that the culture in general long ago turned its back on. So it is an odd thing to sit in a big tent (physically as well as metaphorically) and engage in Christian worship and teaching on Saturday night and the following week.

Of course, while it should not be so, Christians are as fractious as is the rest of humanity. So there is quite a lot of contemporary angst around about the label “evangelical”, whether it performs any useful function and if so what that function is. Personally, if properly defined, I think it does continue to be useful because it is sadly necessary to qualify “Christian” which is used in many senses today well removed from what the word actually means (for which see Acts 11:26). Mind you “properly defining” evangelicals has always been a bit of a problem, or at least has been a problem since “evangelical” became a mainstream sort of a word in the 18^th century. In the 19^th century both Spurgeon and Ryle were involved in the definitional battle. More recently historians like David Bebbington have given it a good go (see his influential “Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s”) as well as those of a more theological stripe (a good recent example is Michael Reeves in “Gospel People”). The debate can become quite spicy, even when conducted by those broadly within the fold comment about the fold, and this brings me back to Keswick.

The Convention has been seen as being fairly influential at least on the British evangelical scene (parking for a moment the question of whether there is such a thing). So I was interested to come across a paper written by J.I. Packer entitled “Keswick and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification” published in 1955 (the full reference is at the end of this post). Packer, an Anglican, was prominent from the 1950’s right up to his death in 2020; along with Martin Lloyd Jones he did much to establish evangelicalism as theologically and intellectually respectable. He, along with Lloyd Jones and others like John Stott, completely transformed the context for those who came after. My generation, with an evangelical subculture already created, resources and popular-level (but challenging) books like Packer’s “Knowing God”, had it much easier than those who went before. But Keswick, or at least the theology Packer saw flowing from it, was problematic. The Convention’s speakers (or at least some of them) and its publications (or at least some of them) were related to a stream of thought in evangelicalism known by various names like “higher life”, “perfectionism” or the “holiness movement” (there are many others). If this sounds a big vague, then that is charge Packer himself makes in his paper, pointing out that until someone put down on paper exactly what “Keswick teaching” was, it had been difficult to pin down. This changed (at least in Packer's mind) in 1952 when Steven Barabas published “So Great Salvation: The History and Message of the Keswick Convention”.

With a forensic precision Packer sought to show how Keswick teaching differed from reformed orthodoxy. Reading his paper just under seventy years later, a number of things struck me. First, it is a bit of an unfair fight. I’m not sure that Barabas was claiming to do more than describe the Convention and some of those associated with it and explain, at a largely popular level, what had been taught there over the years. It seems to be more about the phenomenology than the theology (although there is a bit of that). Packer critiques the theology (to the extent it can be drawn from Barabas’ book) with a professional acuteness that it may not have been capable of bearing. What he often ends up criticizing is what he takes to be logical theological implications of what is written, rather than what Barabas actually wrote. Secondly, “Keswick theology” probably doesn’t name a precise entity (we’re back to labels and their meaning) even when some (like Packer in his paper) want it to. I’m assuming that Barabas must have been doing some distilling and summarizing of teaching that had not been static over the period from 1875 (and has continued to change). We (or rather Packer) end up operating on the assumption that this distillation produces a reliable product. Maybe it did (I confess I haven’t read the book yet), but the distillation was probably more to the level of a rough hooch rather than a fine malt. Perhaps there was a certain lack of precision that Packer filled in. It's a matter of historical judgement how sticky his charges were. Thirdly, one shouldn’t assume that Packer’s view was typical of even the reformed “end” of evangelicalism. At one point he tells us he finds it “surprising that a Reformed reviewer should find in this book ‘no basic discrepancy between the Reformed and evangelical doctrine and the message of Keswick’". In contrast Packer is clear there are several glaring discrepancies. These he attributes to an insufficient attention to theology.

All of this is history of course, and is no less interesting for that. Packer’s analysis is acute and well worth reading and reflecting on. His real target is a creeping Pelagianism that always worth guarding against. But I think that there is probably also a bit of straw-mannery going on too. Acute theology and heart-warming Bible teaching are not antithetical. Indeed you probably can’t have the one without the other, even if the Bible teaching wears the theology lightly. Popularity isn't everything, but it probably is significant that all these years later, here we all are (several thousand of us) in Keswick for the Convention again. I probably won’t agree with everything I hear, and yet it will warm the cockles of the heart. So, at the risk of repeating myself, I say: "bring it on"!       

Packer, J. I. (1955). “Keswick”, and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification, Evangelical Quarterly: An International Review of Bible and Theology, 27(3), 153-167.

The tyranny of the present…..

Although time can be used as an accusation (as in “you’re living in the past”), we appear to be suffering from a different problem at the moment. The Time’s columnist Jenni Russell picked up on this recently in a piece entitled “Ignorance of history feeds certainty in young”, with the subtitle: “The belief that everyone in the past was wicked and today’s digital generation is uniquely virtuous ignores the truth” (The Times 4/3/23 – but it’s behind a paywall). Part of her beef was with historical ignorance, and with the education policy of governments that have tended to encourage it. What had alerted her to this problem was younger friends who were surprised when they were told that idealism, sacrifice and good motives were neither invented or discovered recently, but could also be found in the past. Their view was that in the past everyone was wicked and everything cruel and exploitative. Virtue belonged to the present generation and to it alone, and so it fell to them uniquely to sort out all the mess they had been bequeathed. This is apparently a close relative of the view that we are on a progressive trajectory. The values of the past are in the past and therefore wrong; we have moved on to a better place, and there had better be no going back. If the first set of views depends on an ignorance of history, the second are peculiarly a-historical as though values come from nowhere in time.

C.S. Lewis called out this kind of thinking. He called it “chronological snobbery” which he defined as “..the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” This happens for a whole heap of reasons, some sensible, some less so. It is true that in some ways we know more than previous generations. Thanks to the efforts of my former colleagues among others, we have been forging ahead discovering the intricacies of the inner workings of every cell in our bodies. Whole new fields of endeavour have opened up because of novel, and very often unanticipated findings. Now we not only know about genes, but almost by accident we have discovered how to “edit” them. This offers new ways to tackle disease and improve health as well as providing a powerful new tool for research. Only a century ago, arguments about the inner structure of the atom were yet to give way to the idea of nuclear fission as a  means of energy generation and, unfortunately, a new type of terrifying weapon. Now we have both. What is interesting about these examples is that they illustrate that while the accumulation of knowledge is progress, there are other ways in which we have not moved on. Because both in the case of gene editing and nuclear weapons knowing what can be done has not helped us know what should be done. Indeed, in important ways it may have left us worse off than we were before.

There is another dimension to the hold the present has on us and in the opposite direction. Life is not static because it never arrives at a perfect equilibrium position. Does anyone seriously contend that where we are now is where we want to remain? It may be that there is no clear consensus on where we want to go, but going we are. And yet the present has such a strong pull that is is difficult to imagine anything different let alone anything better. One reason Lewis had a problem with chronological snobbery was that “...our own age is also “a period” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.” The problem is that without careful thought we might assume that we don’t have such illusions, and we certainly wont know what they are. Funnily enough this may be something the past can help us with. For it may be able to illuminate our illusions given that they are different to those of the past.

If we really are on a journey or a trajectory, the present has the power to obscure the destination or target to which we are heading. This may suit some for whom the present may be an appropriate target. From their perspective after perhaps years or decades of struggle they may feel that they have somehow arrived. They have a position to defend. And yet such a defence must be mounted with regret. After all, who is going to claim that their present world is perfect? More worryingly, maybe for others it’s the fight rather than the victory, the journey rather that the arrival. In which case the present is presumably still their unhappy place. Either way, the present is exercising its pull, its tyranny, even at the cost of the future.

But what if the whole thing was illusory? I mean the idea of progress from a purely barbaric past, with the present as some sort of ideal? For there are ways in which we don’t appear to have improved much at all. Admittedly we no longer leave unwanted babies to die on hillsides (one feature of various periods in classical antiquity) and yet we do tolerate the unborn being chemically, biologically or even surgically destroyed on an almost industrial scale. And for all of our technological progress, we still can’t collectively do as we ought even when we can see what we should and even when we know how to do what we should. Perhaps the current best example is climate change. The science has been clear for decades. And the scientific consensus, notwithstanding the lobbying of various monied concerns, has stood for almost as long. What were predictions about the future are increasing our current disastrous present. Yet for the sake of the present, we have been prepared to continue to risk the future. So we’re stuck between the past (of which we are increasingly happy to be ignorant) and the future. It’s almost as though we can’t help ourselves.

In fact it’s exactly that we can’t help ourselves. Just as well rescue is available. A rescue, procured in the past, able to deal with our dilemmas in the present, and to secure the future. Rescue found in “..the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father” (Galatians 1:3,4; NIV).

A “Kennedy moment” in Scotland

I was on a train from Glasgow to Edinburgh last Wednesday, and had just logged on to the in-train Wi-Fi, when the news broke. Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister in the Scottish parliament, and leader of the Scottish National Party, had resigned. For one reason and another there will be few Scots for whom this did not constitute a “Kennedy moment”. An older generation will find it hard to understand that I now have to explain for the younger generation what this is. John F. Kennedy was both the US president and a towering and era-defining political figure. He was assassinated on 22^nd November, 1963. This event was so shocking that it became a memory anchor for a whole generation (or two). People would discus where they were and what they were doing when they heard that Kennedy had been shot. Now, it is true that, to slightly misquote a famous vice-presidential debate, Nicola Sturgeon “is no Jack Kennedy”. But in the relatively small world of Scottish politics, and more widely in the UK, she has been a major presence for more than twenty years.

It isn't hard to find reviews of her political career from friends and foes alike. Love her or loath her, all are agreed that she was (is?) a formidable political operator. Most are also agreed that she was head and shoulders above most of her Scottish opponents and more than a few of her UK ones (she has seen off Conservative UK Prime Ministers almost beyond counting). She has been a dominant figure in Scotland, particularity since she took over from Alex Salmond, her former mentor, after the independence/separation referendum was lost (from her point of view) in 2014. Her whole purpose in politics was to break up the political union that is the United Kingdom, and see Scotland take its place as an independent and sovereign state, one of the family of European nations. Unfortunately a solid majority of her fellow Scots did not agree, and voted 55% to 45% in favour of the status quo. But this of course was merely a temporary setback. Salmond resigned, Sturgeon took over, and began agitating. With Brexit, she saw an opportunity. This she claimed was a material change in circumstances and fundamental alteration in what the opponents of independence had been offering the Scottish people back in 2014. Indeed, when the Brexit vote was broken down by UK nation, Scotland had “voted” against leaving the European Union. This quietly ignores the issue that Scotland, as Scotland, wasn't being asked; it was a UK-wide vote. Just as both Glasgow and Edinburgh were both bound by the outcome of IndyRef1 although they voted differently, so Scotland was bound by the outcome of the Brexit referendum.

In truth it made little difference. Some pretext would have been found, some excuse advanced, as to why the agreed position in 2014, that IndyRef1 was a once-in-a-generation opportunity, wasn't. What few in England seem to have ever grasped is that this single aim was Sturgeon's (and is the SNP's) over-riding aim. Given the name and aim of her political party this is an elementary error. Over-riding means exactly that. To the SNP Independence is more important than educational performance, NHS budgets, drug deaths and tax policy, all of which are highly contentious in Scotland. And this is not only the case because independence is seen as a means to an end i.e. that all of these other problems will be more fixable in an independent Scotland. Even if Scotland were to be demonstrably poorer on its own, this would not matter to a true tartan nationalist. Theirs is a principled position, not a means to and end. Independence is what truly matters and everything else is secondary. Post-Brexit, this should not be that hard to understand in the rest of the UK. A lot of folk voted to leave the EU in the full knowledge that they would be worse off. They were told often enough that this would be one of the outcomes. And so it has transpired.

At the centre of all of this was wee Nicola. But no more. Out of a bright, blueish, Edinburgh sky, came the announcement on Wednesday that she was resigning. And so I shall ever remember that I was pulling out of Easterhouse station on my way to Edinburgh Waverley. But as with trains, life moves on. US politics motored along after JFK's assassination, and political life in Scotland and the UK will do too. And Nicola Sturgeon's true significance will be assessed and reassessed as time, like a train, rolls along. Inevitably, attention has now turned to who will replace her, and what this mean for both Scottish and constitutional politics.

So far, one name seems to be at, or near, the top of the pundits' lists: that of Kate Forbes. Ms Forbes is the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy in the SNP government, and is currently on maternity leave. Kate Forbes is a Christian, and this is clearly seen as a problem by at least some of the commentariat. Some, probably out of ignorance, reach for stereotypes. My suspicion is that few of the political team on the Times know the difference between, say, the Free Church of Scotland and the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, they are both “free” and “presbyterian” after all. But differences there are. For the record Forbes is a member of the Free Church. This, in the view of one of the scribblers at the Times is sufficient to qualify her as a “strict Christian” who belongs to “an austere Christian denomination” (the Times, 18/2/23, p9!). Others see trouble ahead particularly given that currently the SNP in Edinburgh are in cahoots with the Scottish Greens.

Forbes was spared any involvement in the Gender Recognition Reform Bill debates at Holyrood by virtue of her maternity leave. But differences with her party activists over this, abortion and homosexuality (if they exist) have all been highlighted as potential flashpoints. While at Westminster such issues are treated as matters of conscience and are rarely (if ever) whipped, the same is not true in Edinburgh. Only the Conservatives allowed their members a free vote on GRR. There are echoes here of the difficulties Tim Farron got into in the 2017 general election campaign (which I discussed at the time here). He found that he could not both lead a UK political party, and live as a faithful Christian because of the tensions between his Christian beliefs and some of his party's policies which he had to represent. He has also been admirably candid that this was largely because in publicly answering a number of key questions, he had been unwise in his approach. There are undoubtedly some in the media who are already dusting down some of the very same questions to put to Kate Forbes should she stand to be leader of her party and First Minister of Scotland. Such interactions, if and when they come, will tell us more about media, culture and society, than they will reveal anything about Kate Forbes and Christianity. 

Interesting times ahead then. But some of us will always remember where we were on the afternoon of Wednesday 15th February, 2023.

Remembering not to forget

Last night, at the close of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK, I watched the film “Denial” again – it’s currently available on the BBC I-Player (which, unfortunately, is only available in the UK). It tells the story of the London deformation trial of Deborah Lipstadt, an historian, who defended a claim brought against her by a Holocaust denier. Some of the most moving scenes are when she visits Auschwitz, along with her senior and junior counsel, and some experts on the events that unfolded there. One of the experts suggests they walk the perimeter to get an idea of the scale of the place. Her senior council says he has already done that, and so they proceed to part of the complex where Jews were first undressed, and then led into gas chambers, passing pacifying signs saying they were on their way to the baths. Scale is an interesting idea in this context. What word is appropriate? Immense? Industrial? The physical and numerical dimensions of what was done, as horrific as they are, do not come close to encapsulating the events of the Holocaust. For while they reflect the evil intent of what occurred, and are the most accessible aspect of that intent, they do not come close to capturing the true ferocity of the hatred that was vented on ordinary and innocent men and women, boys and girls, the majority of whom were distinguished by one thing and one thing only – they were Jews.  

Others are much more qualified than me to attempt an explanation of that hatred. That there was an implacable, intense and fundamentally irrational hatred burning in the hearts of some of the perpetrators of the Holocaust is undeniable. Much ink has also been spilt on the mass complicity that was required to achieve their evil ends; the blind eyes and numbed hearts (and not all of them in Nazi Germany) that helped, or at least did not hinder, the venting of that hatred. That it grew from poisonous but relatively small beginnings, that it involved the crossing of many lines from the subtle to the gross, seems believable. Where it all ended up, in mass, organized, documented, industrial, attempted genocide, seems barely believable. That’s why it is important that we do not forget, that we do not let the events of the Holocaust become some kind of fantastic myth. There are those who would like it to be regarded in that way. In addition to being monumentally unjust, this would be madness, perhaps a madness that could lead to its repetition. There have, after all, been attempts to follow the same playbook.

It is a playbook that involves the “othering” of a minority. It is always easy to blame someone else for personal or societal ills. Having identified one group or another as a scapegoat, by caricature and innuendo they are made to be somehow less. First of all less than “us”; ultimately less than human. That makes their persecution all the easier and less troubling. This all has to be done in the abstract of course. It helps if “they” don’t really look like “us”. This is usually tricky because, when it comes down to it, we all look pretty similar. Hence the need for caricature, some of which goes beyond superficial differences like skin tone or facial appearance. But even although certain features or claimed attitudes and behaviors might be emphasized, it’s the depersonalized idea that is highlighted, rather than real individuals. It helps if the group in question can be segregated, lest “we” actually get to know some of “them”, for then the barriers might break down before they can be built up.  All of this takes effort. The tragedy is that humanity seems willing from time to time to make such an effort.

But for much of history it seems, Jewish people have been a particular target of such efforts. And there is no avoiding the fact that in my corner of the world those called “Christians” have occasionally been at the forefront of such efforts. While being called a Christian and actually being a Christian are two quite distinct things, it’s the irony that is so much starker than the distinction. You cannot begin to understand what a Christian is, even what the word entails, without an understanding and respect for the Jews and their history. A Christian is a Christ follower, and Christ is not a name, it’s a title. It’s simply the Greek way of saying Messiah, God’s servant promised in the Old Testament to His people the Jews. It is true that what divides Jews and Christians is a disagreement over the identity of the Messiah. But the debt that any nominal or actual Christian owes the Jews, and the obligations that flow from it, is incalculable.

Consider. It goes without saying that, notwithstanding centuries of European art, Jesus was a Jew, as were the twelve Apostles (thirteen, including Paul). It’s a profoundly odd view that says this is all just historically contingent and accidental detail. This was God’s choosing and doing, and is therefore significant. The New Testament story of the Church, post the pivotal events of Pentecost (itself a Jewish feast not a Christian invention) begins with Jews, who initially made up the overwhelming majority of Christians at the beginning. As Jews, they saw their new-found Christian faith a fulfillment of, rather than a repudiation of, what their Old Testament (simply “the Scriptures” to them) taught, and had taught them to expect. Indeed this belief was firmly based on what Jesus Himself had taught them; He had taken two of them to task for not taking their Scriptures seriously enough (you’ll find the story in Luke 24:13-35). Even when a parting of the ways came, with some elements of organized Judaism opposing the growing Gentile church, Paul reminds particularly Gentile Christians that they have been ingrafted into “the nourishing root of the olive tree” (Romans 11:17) and not to be arrogant or proud where God’s ancient people were concerned. Paul had a burning and intense desire that his own people might come to recognize Jesus for who He was, and that there might be no division between Jew and Gentile.

In early Church history there were those who sought to divorce Christianity from its Jewish roots, notably Maricon and his followers. But they were quickly identified as not teaching Christianity at all. There is also still a popular idea that the Bible somehow teaches two Gods opposed to, or at least different to, each other: the Old Testament nasty God, and the New Testament fluffy one. But this can only be maintained by not reading and taking seriously what the Bible, Old and New Testaments actually teaches. For my own part, I do feel debt to those Old Testament saints, the likes of Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, Elijah, Nehemiah, Malachi, and many more beside. And not as just figures from someone else’s ancient history. They tell me about me, and us about us. Without wanting to be proprietorial about it, I do feel that I belong to them and they belong to me, and that we all belong to Christ. That even today some of their human descendants should be identified and abused for simply that reason (i.e. that they are Jews) is both appalling and revealing. We dare not forget where it can lead.

Below the surface.....

There have been some scary headlines recently. Yesterday’s Daily Mail Scottish addition (we’re back in the homeland on a visit) all but declared a polio epidemic. In fact, some evidence has of the virus has been discovered in sewage samples; there have been no cases. Today, Boris’ government is apparently imploding (two bye election loses overnight, and the resignation of the party chairman) while Boris goes for a swim in Rwanda. And of course on the other side of the Atlantic, in one of the world’s younger democracies, words such as coup and insurrection are used daily in the January 6^th Congressional committee hearings (with some justification), and New Yorkers will be able to openly carry their guns thanks to a Supreme Court ruling. Headlines are of course designed to be eye-catching. But if you are a news junkie, their constant catastrophism has an effect. To conclude all is always and only disaster is probably to take the headlines too seriously. It usually entails not reading the actual story (which is often more moderate and nuanced). But to conclude that it is all just about overwrought teenage scribblers (to use Nigel Lawson’s famous put-down of financial journalists) over-egging the pudding is also probably unwise.

Let’s begin over the pond. The Congressional hearings on the January 6^th attack on the US Capitol (which it clearly was), have been revealing and are chilling. Former President Trump is both more calculating and more determined that he is often given credit for. And it appears that he set out, probably knowingly and certainly illegally (as he was often told) to subvert a basically sound election result. He is no democrat (with a small d obviously). I have expressed previously my bemusement that so many “evangelicals” voted for him. Any one of his utter detachment from the truth and anything approaching integrity, his attitude to people in general and women in particular, and his basic lack of competence, should have disqualified him. I know the arguments (the other “guy”, the Supreme Court etc) that were deployed. But for anyone with a commitment to Scripture, these arguments could not, and should not have stumbled as far as the end of the runway, never mind flown. In the US the presidential election is, in most states, a binary choice – or you can sit on your hands. Trump has not gone away and a comeback presidential run cannot be ruled out. But underlying his arrival and staying power, with all that they might imply, is something more basic and powerful. Whether he is a deliverance or a judgment on the US, Providence, that great outworking of the sovereign purposes of God, is quietly at work.

We also have our own travails here in the UK. Boris’ basic lack of interest in truth and integrity, so noted from his earlier career that some warned of why he was unsuitable for high office, has once again been demonstrated in his approach to that same high office. You can often tell when he is dissembling because he mutters; and he mutters a lot. He has now learned that his party colleagues will not only tolerate him, but will continue to support him for fear of the alternatives. Ethics, or the lack thereof (along with the absence of an appointed ethics advisor) mark his premiership, and don't seem to bother his supporters. And he is not even careful or measured about his approach. Tony Blair suffered the accusation of lying over the Iraq war. But this was an accusation; it is debatable whether he did or did not. But there is really no argument about Boris who has already been sacked twice for telling porkies, and has deserved to be sacked again (and for some time). He appears to revel in his reputation. It would apparently not matter to him if he was known as a liar as long as he was also known as a doer. This no longer shocks; but it should. Just as Billy Bush should have ended Donald, so all this muttered dissembling should have disqualified Boris. But it didn’t and we are where we are. 

These local difficulties have their global accompaniment. Just as it looked as though the global pandemic was slackening, and we thought that with the help of vaccines we had escaped the worst, Covid is making a comeback in China, potentially with global consequences (and then there’s “monkey pox” and polio of course). The war in Ukraine, as well as a tragedy for Ukraine, and in its own way for Russia, is pushing a large slices of the developing world into hunger, if not outright famine. And it is causing severe economic dislocation adding to that caused by the pandemic. Because of the media’s linear and limited thought processes, which in the West largely dictates political agendas, the pressure to respond to climate change has been largely removed from the political class. Indeed, because of economic pressure and the effects of sanctions on Russia, coal is making a comeback, and oil is again highly profitable. And populations suffering from the kind of inflation not experienced for fifty years don’t want to hear about green taxes and switching to environmentally friendly and marginally more expensive farming techniques. Relief is wanted now. And a generation of democratic politicians who live by expedient rather than principle (as did older political generations to be fair), but now without even ideology to guide them, are probably not up to the task of leading rather than following.

In all of this, it is easy to miss the deeper point. What did the individual Israelite in Judah feel as he or she saw their relatives among the northern tribes being swept away by Assyria? When the Assyrians approached Jerusalem in Hezekiah’s day, to insult and threaten, Hezekiah had the benefit (as we do) of Isaiah to explain the deeper meaning of what was going on. We know that God was working His purposes out. The individual Israelite, if they had a knowledge of their own Scriptures and a sensitivity to their surroundings, might have had an awareness of larger forces at work. Tragically few had either, and their leaders largely and consistently discounted what the likes of Isaiah had to say (and then write). Faced with a bemusing cocktail of war, disease, famine and political turmoil, and the daily struggle to survive, one suspects that the immediate probably obscured the fundamental. And so to our day.

I do seek to understand the proximate causes of the current situation, local, national and global. I am a self-confessed news junkie, and so may well be afflicted with a sombre mood because of headline-itis. I know that there is a need for care when tempted to point to particular events and crying judgement or some such. And I’m aware that in almost every generation, Christians have found reasons to decry their current circumstances and cry both “How long O Lord” and “Amen. Come Lord Jesus”. But beneath the froth and the fury, Providence does proceed unimpeded. Both the trajectory and the endpoint of history have already been revealed (and it’s not the triumph of Western liberal democracy whatever that is).

So, maybe soon…..

Life in the pandemic XXVI Words and the “death” of postmodernism

I have led a fairly sheltered intellectual and academic existence, just one of many advantages working on the science side of a modern University campus. Modern universities don’t really operate as universities of course. Ideally a university should be a community of scholars with cross-fertilization of ideas across a wide range of disciplines and outlooks. The idea is that even very different disciplines can enlighten and stimulate each other. I can’t be the only scientist to whom good ideas have come while sitting in a seminar whose topic is light years away from some current piece of gristle I’ve been chewing on. However, someone once quipped that academia is the business of getting to know more and more about less and less. On this logic, professors know everything about nothing. Would it be remiss of me to point out that I’m a mere Reader? But it is a fact that we tend to hunker down in ever tighter intellectual cliques and tribes as time and careers progress. Eventually the cell and molecular biologists rarely see those who work on the behaviour of whole organisms, never encounter those (still within the scientific family) who reside in the departments of the physical (as opposed to biological) sciences, and are barely aware of those mythical creatures across the road (actually usually across several roads) who deal in words or thought, sound or pictures. That said, such isolation does have its advantages.

Most of us in the scientific world are probably best described as “modern” in the way we go about our task. This doesn’t sound too bad until you understand that since the 1960s or thereabouts, “modernism” has been seen as dangerous tomfoolery by many of our more arty colleagues who generally consider themselves post-modernists. Modernism is that post-enlightenment mode of thinking that elevates human reason as the key tool for obtaining objective knowledge about the world around us, providing a sure way for humanity to progress. It has been both powered and validated by the apparent success of science and technology. However, it has always had its critics. Romanticism in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries was an early harbinger of trouble ahead. While the power and success of science seemed hard to deny, the materialism that usually accompanied modernity (and it was sometimes a radical materialism) seemed to leave something important out of the account. And the kind of progress science and technology generated wasn’t always perceived as an unalloyed good. The same industrialisation that provided economic progress for many, spawned dark satanic mills for some. Diseases may have been conquered, but poverty killed thousands. And even scientific endeavour had some ugly pseudoscientific offspring in the form of movements like social Darwinism and eugenics.

Bubbling away under the surface were the intellectual forces that eventually led to the “postmodernism” that emerged in the 1960s, sweeping all before it. Or at least it appeared to. Defining postmodernism is a bit like trying to eat soup with a fork; it’s an enterprise doomed to failure. But definitions abound. Britannica defines it as “a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad scepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.” Postmodernism came to be seen as a broad attack on the kind of reason and reasoning that we thought we depended upon in science, and even on the idea that words carry meaning and allow sensible discourse about a world “out there”. There was a specifically scientific manifestation of postmodernism in the form of Kuhn’s famous book “The structure of scientific revolutions” (discussed briefly here). This sought to reduce progress in science, in which a new theory or approach displaces and old one, to a type of “conversion” experience; scientific “progress” (so Kuhn’s critics claimed) was being reduced to a series of almost irrational leaps. Not that most of us scientists were that bothered you understand. Much of this “revolution” passed us by in our isolation from such intellectual fashions.

Perhaps it was because in principle we have to deal with reality as it is (or at least as we perceive it to be). All scientist are in some sense “realists” – there is a real external world, independent of my ideas and feelings about it, that can be prodded and poked. The methods that had stood us in good stead for a couple of centuries, seemed still, indeed seem still, to serve us well. So we left our colleagues in the humanities and social sciences to argue the toss over who was oppressing whom by this or that word or sentence, continued to prod and poke, wrote up and published our results, refined and refuted, and generally just got on with things. Admittedly, neither we nor our students thought as hard as we should have done about the thinking we were actually doing (something I lamented here). But, as the pandemic has demonstrated, it’s probably just as well that we did "just get on with it". Some of the most powerful tools that have led to effective vaccines being delivered in record time stem from just quietly beavering away. And perhaps that’s why, particularly in the pandemic, postmodernism appears to be in big trouble. At least in its more extreme forms it has been unmasked as is a diversion, an entertainment and an indulgence that can’t cope with hard realities. The science that is now saving lives has turned out to be more important than academic word games.

Personally, while not a complete fan of modernism (reason has always had its limits), some of postmodernism’s contentions always seemed ridiculous to me. There is a whole strand that prizes obscure language and then seeks to claim that reason must always be subverted by slippery communication with mixed motives. Words cannot be trusted to accurately convey meaning, they are inevitably ambiguous. The problem is that the proponents of these views apparently thought this only applied to other people’s words; their words were to be taken at face value. But this has to be a sort of self-refuting proposition. But it gets worse. It was the postmoderns’ deliberately obscure and convoluted language that turned out to be easily subverted and exploited by parody.

Famously, the physicist Alan Sokal composed a nonsense paper and submitted it to a prominent academic journal (Social Text). The paper went through the normal (rigorous?) review processes of the journal, and was accepted for publication in a revised form. It was, in Sokal’s words “brimming with absurdities and blatant non sequiturs” but was actually published in a special edition of the journal. The aftermath of the hoax, and the debate which followed, are detailed by Sokal and Bricmont in their book “Intellectual Impostures”. This was not a one off. In 2018 essentially the same thing was done on a much larger scale. Twenty fake papers were submitted to a number of prominent academic journals, bastions of postmodern thought in various forms. Of the 20 papers, seven were accepted for publication, and most of the others might well have been had not the perpetrators called time on their hoax. Only six of the twenty were thrown out. This was a field in trouble.

It turns out the trouble may be have been terminal. Having almost missed the “death”of new atheism, I may actually have missed the death of postmodernism. Before some of us had even begun to grapple with it at our end of the campus, Alan Kirby was writing in “Philosophy Now” that we all really should be post-postmodernists. That was back in 2006. It seems that words do convey meaning, and reason is reasonable again.  Some of us never thought anything different.

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.