Barely conscious(ness)

You may not have been conscious of it, but big arguments have been swirling around the issue of consciousness (for the example that prompted this post see here). Science had, then didn’t have and now again has big problems with consciousness. You know an argument is in trouble when its starting point is the denial of probably the one thing we are all aware of (at least when we are awake and healthy) – our consciousness. Descartes was so sure of his that he based his philosophy on it (the famous “I think [doubt] therefore I am”). But you might be surprised to learn that for a good chunk of the 20^th century in science, a good chunk of scientists were convinced that either it did it not exist or if it did, it didn’t “do” anything. They were the behaviourists, represented by B. F. Skinner (he of the infamous box). Consciousness was “nothing but” (ie reducible to) behaviour (by which they primarily meant movement) or propensities to behave. Don’t feel any need to understand any this (a notion which clearly assumes some degree of consciousness on your part!), because such views didn’t last long into the second half of the twentieth century. Behaviourist schemes clearly didn’t work, and the starting point was in any case fatally flawed.

But historically there had been an ongoing struggle to accommodate subjective, first-person, mental states (consciousness) within a thoroughly empirical (scientific) approach to our understanding of ourselves. Those devoted to the nineteenth century theory/myth of the conflict between science (good) and theology (bad), didn’t want to provide any space for the immaterial (whether soul or mind – for current purposes assume that both words name the same thing). But not having a satisfying material explanation for what we are all most aware of was a bit of a problem. If claiming that things like mental states did not exist was not viable, what to do? Well, assuming there was a thoroughly material explanation for our private interior self (potentially another fatally flawed assumption), given the powerful new tools of neuroscience such phenomena had to be explicable in terms of what was going on in the brain (that clearly material lump of stuff inside our heads). So there arose an empirical subdiscipline within neuroscience, that of “consciousness studies”.

Writing 10 years ago in the inaugural editorial of the journal “Neuroscience of Consciousness” the editors credited a 1990 paper by Crick and Koch as marking “the rebirth of consciousness science as a serious exercise”(Seth et al. 2015; Crick and Koch 1990). The publication of the new journal reflected “the maturity of this rigorous and empirically grounded approach to the science of subjective experience”. While they themselves made no claim that this was necessarily the only available approach to subjective experience, such a claim had already appeared in Crick’s book, published the previous year (Crick 1994). Crick and Koch claimed in their paper that “Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness” and avoided a “precise definition”. This, along with other knotty issues, was left to one side “otherwise much time can be frittered away in fruitless argument”, implicitly a criticism of what had gone before. Philosophy (and certainly theology) had had its day. It was now over to science to explain the previously inexplicable, even consciousness (see Chemero and Silberstein 2008). This particular body swerve would prove to be costly.

Now, thirty five years on from the “rebirth of consciousness science”, where stands the project that had reached “maturity” ten years ago? Franken and colleagues recently published the results of a survey of consciousness researchers who attended two consecutive annual meetings of the Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness (established in 1994 and later the sponsor of Neuroscience of Consciousness) to investigate “the theoretical and methodological foundations, common assumptions, and the current state of the field of consciousness research” (Francken et al. 2022). Among the issues they found “a lack of consensus regarding the definition and most promising theory of consciousness” and “that many views and opinions currently coexist in the consciousness community. Moreover, individual respondents appear to hold views that are not always completely consistent from a theoretical point of view”. Lest it be felt that this is a rather slim basis on which to form a view as to the current state of the field, Seth and Bayne (2022) reported in a recent extensive review that “in the case of consciousness, it is unclear how current theories relate to each other, or whether they can be empirically distinguished”. They recommended “the iterative development, testing and comparison of theories of consciousness” . Franken et al (2022) used ten different theoretical constructs in their survey, Seth and Bayne (2022) identified a “selection” of twenty-two “theories of consciousness” (see their Table 1) which they grouped into four broad categories and Kuhn (limiting himself to “materialism” theories) identified fourteen neurobiological theories, to which he added lists of philosophical (N=12), electromagnetic (7) and computational/informational (4) theories (Kuhn 2024). Confused? Well, it turns out the field of consciousness studies is.

An attempt to follow Seth and Bayne’s advice, using a “large-scale adversarial collaboration” to experimentally compare predictions made by two of the major competing theories of consciousness (“global neuronal workspace theory”, GNWT vs “integrated informational theory”, IIT) recently reported results in Nature (Ferrante et al. 2025; see also the accompanying Nature Editorial). The evidence that emerged partially supported and partially challenged both theories. However, the aftermath is more revealing. In response to the preprint and media coverage of the paper (the actual Nature paper was submitted for publication in June 2023, accepted for publication in March 2025 and published in April 2025) a long list of researchers (including recognised leaders in neuroscience) put their names to an open letter on the PsyArXiv preprint server condemning the exercise as flawed, calling IIT “pseudoscience” and objecting to its characterisation as a leading candidate theory for explaining consciousness at all (Fleming, et al. 2023). Proponents of GNWT also called into question the discussion of the results and the conclusions drawn (Naccache et al. 2025). All of this suggests that what flowed from Crick and Koch’s avoidance of a definition of consciousness was basic conceptual confusion. But many had claimed that this was the problem at the time; this was precisely the charge made against the field by the philosopher Peter Hacker not long after its “rebirth” (Bennett and Hacker 2003, 239–44; see also Hacker 2012). Nobody is sure what it is they’re talking about, and even those who do claim to know what they mean usually agree that the have no way of measuring the “it” they are clear about. So the next time you read a headline about “understanding” consciousness, just be aware – we don’t.

It’s not just the state of the specific scientific sub-field of consciousness research that appears to have problems and confusions. Concerns have emerged from within the wider materialist camp. Some more history is in order. The philosopher Thomas Nagel is perhaps best known for his classic paper “What is it like to be a bat?”; with regard to the problem of consciousness, the philosopher Patricia Churchland called this paper a “watershed articulation” (Nagel 1974; Churchland 1996). The problem which Nagel drew attention to was the one left by the demise of the behaviourists; the “subjective character of experience” (the what-is-it-like-to-be-ness) was not captured “by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental”. Materialist accounts of thinking people left something vital out of the account. So he suggested that what was needed were new studies of the subjective and the mental partially answered in subsequent development of consciousness studies described above.

But that was then, what about now? Advances in neuroscience have definitely occurred. With all that  we know now (all those lovely coloured brain scans, snapshots of what goes on while people think), surely a thoroughly materialist account of us, which leaves the concept of the immaterial (be it mind or soul) lying redundant in its wake, is possible? Or at least given such progress, we should be in a position to see clearly how in principal it might be possible. Writing in 2012, Nagel was, if anything, more concerned than he was in the 70’s. Consciousness remained one of the major sticking points causing his concern: “The fundamental elements and laws of physics and chemistry have been inferred to explain the behaviours of the inanimate world. Something more is needed to explain how there can be conscious, thinking creatures..” (Nagel 2012, 20). And yet his concerns went beyond the existence of (as yet unexplained) consciousness to the wider materialist project: “The inadequacies of the naturalistic and reductionist world picture seem to me to be real”(Nagel 2012, 22). He did not find theism (the “polar opposite” of materialism) “any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view”, but was having a problem trying to imagine naturalistic accounts that were able to accommodate previously excluded elements like consciousness (or purpose, belief, love and the like). He concluded by accepting as conceivable that “the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations” (Nagel 2012, 128). The philosopher Mary Midgley took Nagel’s argument (along with those made by others) to provide evidence that the “credo of materialism” was “beginning to fray around the edges” (Midgley 2014, 14). Things haven’t improved since.

Does any of this matter? On one level, not really. You are still you, even although there is no scientific explanation for you in material terms. At least no one is now claiming that because of the lack of that explanation “you” don’t exist. Fundamentally, of course, I would be argue that science with its third-party, observational statements, which necessarily leave out of the account things like purpose, hope, love, agency and the like (ie things that really matter to us), can only ever provide a partial account of what we are as “persons” (something most scientist are clear about – usually). As Midgley and many others have argued the argument that only science defines or explains important stuff, including what we are as persons, is a monstrous overreach. Such claims are still occasionally made, but this view too is “fraying”.

But there are of course other sources of data, other (complimentary) ways of reasoning, other views of who and what we are as persons (something I touched on previously). If the materialist program is faltering, these need to be heard again. Wonder what (the decidedly immaterial) God thinks?

[PS: I don't normally provide references to the literature in these posts, but as I happened to have them to hand, I thought it would be churlish not to....]

Bennett, Maxwell R, and Peter Michael Stephan Hacker. 2003. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Blackwell.

Chemero, Anthony, and Michael Silberstein. 2008. “After the Philosophy of Mind: Replacing Scholasticism with Science*.” Philosophy of Science 75 (1): 1–27. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.1086/587820.

Churchland, Patricia S. 1996. “The Hornswoggle Problem.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (5–6): 402–8.

Crick, F. H. C. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Macmillan.

Crick, Francis, and Christof Koch. 1990. “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness.” 2 (263–275): 203.

Ferrante, Oscar, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin, et al. 2025. “Adversarial Testing of Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theories of Consciousness.” Nature 642 (8066): 133–42. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08888-1.

Fleming, S.M, Chris D Frith, M Goodale, et al. 2023. “The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness as Pseudoscience.” Preprint, PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zsr78.

Francken, Jolien C, Lola Beerendonk, Dylan Molenaar, et al. 2022. “An Academic Survey on Theoretical Foundations, Common Assumptions and the Current State of Consciousness Science.” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2022 (1): niac011. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niac011.

Hacker, P. M. S. 2012. “The Sad and Sorry History of Consciousness: Being, among Other Things, a Challenge to the ‘Consciousness-Studies Community.’” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 70: 149–68.

Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. 2024. “A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications.” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (August): 28–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2023.12.003.

Midgley, M. 2014. Are You an Illusion? Heretics (Durham, England). Acumen. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hHtnQEACAAJ.

Naccache, Lionel, Claire Sergent, Stanislas Dehaene, Xia-Jing Wang, Michele Farisco, and Jean-Pierre Changeux. 2025. “GNW Theoretical Framework and the ‘Adversarial Testing of Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theories of Consciousness.’” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2025 (1): niaf037. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf037.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83: 435–50.

Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press.

Seth, Anil K., and Tim Bayne. 2022. “Theories of Consciousness.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 23 (7): 439–52. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00587-4.

Seth, Anil K., Biyu J. He, and Jakob Hohwy. 2015. “Editorial.” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2015 (1): niv001. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niv001

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.

It’s (as yet) all Greek to me

I’ve mentioned my studies a couple of times (see here and here). Alas, formally they are now over. I say alas because I have really enjoyed all of the process, content and, as it happens, the outcome. Perhaps it’s the academic in me. So, next summer, all being well, I shall graduate from Union. However, for tactical reasons I managed to avoid serious engagement with the original languages in which the Bible is written (primarily Hebrew and Greek). This was tactical because at my relatively advanced age learning a new language in the time available, essentially from scratch, would have been a big ask. I have picked up occasional words in both Hebrew and Greek in my MTh studies, and over the years from commentaries and articles. But I have no real understanding of the grammar of the languages, and the actual number of words I am familiar with you could probably count on the fingers of two hands and plus the toes of one foot. Given the time and assessment constraints in the MTh, there were lots of other things I wanted to study and (whisper it) I wanted to pass well. Still, this avoidance has led to the occasional pang of guilt. So with the MTh now complete, I have embarked on learning New Testament Greek with the help of some of Union's learning resources (which I still have access to as a current student). I hope to be of a suitable standard by graduation to contemplate taking some of the language modules on a “stand-alone” basis next session.

But why bother you might ask? After all, I actually believe in what is often called the doctrine of Scripture’s perspicuity. “Perspicuity” is to the contemporary mind a very opaque word meaning “clarity”. While “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves…” (to quote the Westminster Confession, 1.7), the really important things, like how God can be truly known, is so clearly taught that “not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” “Ordinary means” in this context is the reading and teaching of Scripture in our vernacular languages (ie in translation). This was a major point of contention in the Reformation and for a recent book-length defence of this position Mark Thompson’s “A Clear and Present Word” is worth a read. But it is not that there is a central kernel that can be generally understood, surrounded by lots of really hard stuff that should be left to “experts” (whatever that means). In the Old Testament, Israel was told to teach what God had revealed to their children (Deuteronomy 6:7) and it is emphasised that this is a far from impossible task; in general God’s words are both understandable and doable (Deuteronomy 30:11-14). In the New Testament, much of Jesus’ teaching is remarkably clear and straightforward. It’s not that the semantic content of both Jesus’ teaching and the rest of the New Testament, the words and concepts, are hard to understand. The real problem lies elsewhere. The very fist step to understanding is not essentially intellectual but spiritual, more about the heart than the mind. You can get an idea of what I mean by reading Ephesians 2:1-3. Ask yourself what the dead are capable of.

When God by His Spirit brings life where there was only death, and throws that switch that brings light where before there was darkness (akin to Jesus’ healings of the blind), the Bible comes alive in whatever language you happen to normally operate in. It remains God’s word and provides more than enough to keep any one of us going for more than a lifetime. Why, then, a need to get into the weeds of the original (or near to the original) Greek? Because they are not weeds and there is always more, layer after layer of nerve jangling, mind-stretching truth. But here are some immediate reasons. All translation involves interpretation. So the Bible translations that I use rely on the interpretations of others. Usually these are fine; no text can mean anything (something that the more extreme post-modernists got disastrously wrong) and only occasionally do different translations diverge significantly. But to be able to see where and why the divergence in English comes about, strikes me as valuable. And of course some divergent interpretations are occasionally based on a particular asserted meaning of the original text. To be able to go and check that there hasn’t been some twisting of the original, or that some linguistic fallacy isn’t being perpetrated (for a number of these see Don Carson’s “Exegetical Fallacies”), is also valuable. Then there is the pleasure of eventually being able to almost see into the mind of John and compare it with Paul, to develop a feel for their individual writing style. All of these seem to me to be real incentives for doing what will be hard work over an extended period.

So I’m currently on the initial slopes of the foothills. Some are quite steep. Others seem to be going on for quite a distance. My progress is sometimes slower than I would like. But the journey is a worthwhile one, and the view from the top will be glorious.

Missed metaphor......

Here was me thinking I would just do a quick search on the subject of metaphor and its uses (mainly because I heard Noel Gallagher talking about metaphor in song writing on the radio this morning). I know we all enjoy a good metaphor. I know we all often employ metaphors, including the famous  “sick as a parrot” overused by football reporters. How little I knew. Metaphors, and the discussion of them, are a seething ocean…. See what I mean?

The ubiquity of metaphors in language leads neatly to the notion that metaphor is somehow basic to how we think. Indeed, in what is considered by some to be a classic, paradigm-shaping book published in 1980, “Metaphors we live by”, Lakoff and Johnson claimed exactly that. Metaphors are not just features of language, ways we seek to communicate with each other. They are rooted in basic biology and baked into the way we think, allowing us make sense of the world around us. Indeed, there is empirical evidence that they might do more than this. Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) showed that by exposing participants to particular metaphors, it was possible to influence how they thought about particular scenarios. So, comparing a “crime wave” to either a “wild animal preying on” or “a virus infecting” a community, altered their views about how to deal with crime. It’s a short step from this to the idea of using metaphors as “dog whistles” in political discourse (another metaphor). Usually this a charge made against political opponents. But the politicians have worked out that using metaphors in this particular way provides the kind of plausible deniability that they can deploy against their opponents while stirring up (there I go again) their political base. It turns out that this is all hotly contested stuff.

But back to the business of sensible communication. In part, metaphors are useful because they can helpfully illuminate (like good prose), while having a degree of flexibility (they lack the precision of propositions). They can also be used to encapsulate something complex in relatively few words (usually by alluding to an image) and are therefore an economical means of communication. And they can help us grapple with things that are so complex that we cannot understand everything about them, while highlighting what we can understand. And they necessarily engage the imagination in a way other types of language often do not. When you get to thinking about it, Christians (or perhaps even religious-minded people in general) should be at home with them.

The Bible is replete with metaphors, and the reason for at least some of them isn’t too hard to fathom. If the Bible is the primary means of revelation by which a transcendent God, who is a completely different form of being from you and me, makes Himself known to us, then it is hardly a surprise that metaphor is to the fore (as it were). In fact most of our language about God must be metaphorical. Some metaphors are in the form of straightforward anthropomorphisms – Scripture speaks of God’s hands and eyes even although as a being who is spirit He does not literally possess hands and eyes. Others find their meaning within Scripture itself.

In the Old Testament history of Israel, we find the basis of many significant New Testament metaphors. For example, in order to be safe from the punishment that was to fall on Egypt as the climax to a series of plagues, the enslaved Israelites had to take a lamb and sacrifice it. The blood of this lamb, when applied to the doorways of their houses would protect them from what was to happen. This deliverance formed the basis of the Passover feast which was to serve as a reminder of, and pointer to, this great event in their deliverance.

When Jesus appears near the Jordan thousands of years later, John points at Him and calls Him the Lamb of God (John 1:29). In a sense that’s all he has to say. A whole host of images and associations immediately come flooding to those familiar with such language. But they are not looking a young sheep of course. As they look to where John is pointing they find themselves looking at a man. The power of metaphor. And even although this is early in Jesus’ public ministry, there is perhaps an even earlier allusion that employs this same metaphor. It is one that I had entirely missed.

It’s nearly Christmas, and all this week at Bridge we’ve been presenting “the Christmas Journey” to school children – basically a presentation of the Christmas story. I know that it’s only the first week in December, but to be fair we’ve been enduring Christmas movie channels since September. It has always struck me as odd that an angel tells a bunch of shepherds that a baby wrapped in “swaddling cloths” is a sign (Luke 2:12). I suppose it could simply have been that this is how they would know the baby in question was “the” baby as opposed to “a” baby (although presumably the fact that said baby would also be in a  feeding trough would also be a bit of a giveaway). But someone pointed out to me this week that it has been suggested that the shepherds weren’t just any old shepherds; they were “Levitical” shepherds. And they were specifically tasked with raising lambs for sacrifice up at the temple in Jerusalem, lambs that had to be perfect. These were not strictly speaking Passover lambs for the most part, but that’s where the flexibility of a good metaphor is useful. To increase the shepherds' chances of producing quality lambs (i.e. without “spot of blemish) and decrease their losses, lambs would often be birthed in special shepherds' caves in the vicinity of Bethlehem, and then bound in cloths (swaddling cloths) to prevent cuts, bruises and other damage. This, in effect, identified them as sacrificial lambs. So, now the direction to go and look at a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths takes on a whole new significance. These particular shepherds looking at that particular baby, triggers all those metaphorical associations that John would highlight about thirty years later.

We don’t know if the shepherds made all of these connections. Nor do we know when Jesus first disciples managed to get their heads around what John said. But this particular metaphor is worth bearing in mind for the next few weeks.