Joy in a cursed world

It turns out that joy is a serious business. In 2015 the John Templeton Foundation awarded over $4M to Yale Divinity School for a project entitled “Theology of Joy and the Good Life”, the first aim of which was to develop “a new theological movement that places reflection on joy and the good life at the centre of Christian theology”. You can watch a series of YouTube videos in which serious theologians, philosophers and others seriously discuss joy. But never mind reflecting on it, where is it to be found? In a world in which several of the horses of apocalypse appear to be at least trotting towards the stable door, if not yet galloping into action, joy is at a premium.

You won’t be surprised to learn that my goto source for important subjects is not YouTube but the Bible. Even the words used in the Bible for joy have an interesting story to tell. Studying biblical words does not capture everything there is to say on a topic of course, just as studying the properties of the pigment used in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa cannot capture everything there is to say about his masterpiece. As an example, there’s an interesting story about when the translators of the Septuagint were translating Hebrew words for joy in the Old Testament into Greek. They hit a snag. Joy played a role in the religions of the ancient world; the Greeks knew how to have a good time, even in a religious setting. But this frequently involved copious amounts of alcohol and various sexual activities. The Jewish scholars translating the Old Testament wanted to emphasise that the joy experienced in the worship of Yahweh was of a different nature, and they didn’t want to import into their translation unwelcome cultural baggage. Their solution was to invent a new word in Greek which they used when referring to joy related to worship.

In the New Testament joy is mentioned 326 times including cognates and synonyms. On 141 of these occasions it is inward joy (chairein, chara) that is referenced. These words are noticeably similar to another Greek word - charis (grace). It has been suggested that there is a clear link between joy and grace; the idea is that true joy is experienced by those who are recipients of God’s grace. But the whole point about grace is that it is undeserved. Unpalatable as we tend to find the notion, underserving of God’s grace, and the joy that flows from it, is exactly where we all start off. We live under a curse in a cursed world. Hence the problem with joy.

The reason the world is cursed is laid out in the early chapters of the Bible, in Genesis. And it is no accident that the first human emotion recorded in Scripture is not joy but is Adam’s fear (Gen 3:10), followed by Cain’s anger (Gen 4:5). This does not mean there was no joy in Eden, presumably there was. But it looks like a point is being made, something is being highlighted. In fact, joy is hardly mentioned at all in the first five books of the Bible; references to it are scattered and sporadic until we reach book #5: Deuteronomy. Again, it is presumably not the case that between the events of Genesis 3 and the end of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness no human being was ever joyful. Perhaps joy (of a sort) accompanied Lamech’s hymn to violence (Gen 4:23,24), and presumably Abraham and Sarah experienced joy at the arrival of their promised son Isaac. Many in Israel were no doubt joyful at their deliverance from Egypt at the Red Sea (although their moaning and grumbling is a much larger feature of the record). However, if we treat the five books of Moses (the Pentateuch) as a single literary entity, it has to be significant that after a period of “literary” scarcity, joy does then start to consistently crop up in Deuteronomy. After a long time, and a lot of words, it is mentioned twice in Deuteronomy 12 in the context of Israel coming together to celebrate and worship in the presence of God. He is very clear that He is not to be worshiped in the manner of the peoples of the land Israel will enter but in the manner and in the place of His choosing. They were to feast and worship and rejoice. In Deuteronomy 14, Israel is instructed to “eat before the Lord your God and rejoice” (v26). In the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Booths Israel was to “..rejoice before the Lord..”.

To help things along, Israel had a hymnbook, the Psalms, and lots of these open with joy in the very first verse (e.g. Ps 21, 47, 66, 95, 81, 97, 100), many with the idea of shouting, singing or praising God with joy. And it is in God that the “fullness of joy” is experienced (Ps16:11). What was promised and commanded in Deuteronomy was experienced by the Psalmist, and by those who took up his words in the worship of the living God. But the Old Testament is, in part, a record of Israel’s sin and rebellion and this led to judgement and exile. However, even in the midst of judgment and suffering, one of the Old Testament prophets Habakkuk wrote: “… yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (Hab 3:18). The lack of blossom on the fig trees and an absence of fruit on the vine (Hab 3:17), a big deal in Habakkuk’s day, meant his circumstances were hardly those conducive to joy. But the joy he is speaking about is not found in his circumstances; it’s found in God.

Israel eventually returned from exile of course, and in Ezra 6 joy resulted from the rededication of the temple, the proper place for the worship of God (Ezra 6:16). Once again Israel was able to celebrate their feasts, and once again this was marked by joy (Ezra 6v22). But throughout this part of the story one is left with a sense of unfinished business. And as the Old Testament closes we are left wondering where is the joy spoken of by prophets like Isaiah. In Isaiah 61, everlasting joy was promised (v7). In the day when God creates “new heavens and a new earth” (Isaiah 65:17), Jerusalem will be a joy (65:18) and be rejoiced over by the Lord Himself (65:19; 62:4b). There was even a day promised when God Himself would rejoice over His people with “loud singing” (Zeph 3:17)! I don’t think that day was reached during the period covered by the Old Testament, and I don’t think that day is now. It is still to come.

Joy is possible in this world of pandemics and wars, of inequality and injustice, of suffering and famine. It’s possible in the teeth of these realities. It’s to be found in the same place ancient Israel was to find it – in the presence of a promise keeping, gracious God, with the community of God’s people. It is not grounded in circumstance, for how could it be? But even this is still only a shadow of a promised joy, a down-payment, a deposit with the balance still to be paid out. Joy is to be found partly in response to God (who He is and what He has done) and partly a resource to keep going in what is, still, a cursed world. But this lost world is not the last word, and in a day yet to come, our singing, and our joy, will be blended with His.

What’s so good about this Good Friday?

Just as grave concerns about a global pandemic, caused by a new virus for which there wasn’t initially a test or cure, begin to recede (whether they should or not only time will tell), war breaks out on the continent of Europe, a continent that everyone thought had learned its lesson in the 20^th century. And not the kind of war Brits have been involved in recently, whether in the Falklands (40 years ago this year), the Gulf or Iraq – wars of choice, mainly about politics – but an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned war of national survival. A big state has picked on a smaller state, and for spurious reasons has attempted to steam-roller it into oblivion. In the pandemic we elected to follow the science. And science largely stepped up to the plate. Recent discoveries and new molecular and genetic techniques provided tests and vaccines, and then treatments, in record time. So now, even although there’s still lots of infection about, particularly from dreaded “new variants”, the fear and certainly the panic has largely dissipated. Nothing of any spiritual interest to see here, or so it would seem. And no particular spiritual lessons to be gleaned from war in Ukraine.

But there are two related things that strike me. The first is that surely now no one can cleave any longer to the naively optimistic modernist belief in the inevitable progress of humanity. For years (indeed hundreds of years) they’ve been telling us that the Christians and their Bible were just flat wrong. Humanity is not intrinsically and self-helplessly bad. Men and women are good, made bad by their environment and lack of education. Improve their environment, and educate everyone (neither of which is a bad idea), and all the bad stuff will stop happening. And, of course, it’s religion that starts wars. Do away with religion and that will also be to our benefit. No religion, no war. Anyway, religion in general, and Christianity in particular, belong to humanity’s adolescence; we can progress past that. We have progressed past that. Well, apparently not.

The war in Ukraine is every bit a cruel and violent as any fought in the 20^th century. And as for rules governing war, rules like not targeting civilians, or civilian infrastructure, apparently there’s a new rule book. The one that allowed for the systematic destruction of Grozny and Aleppo; that’s the one that is now being followed in Mariupol and Kharkiv. So far the numbers of dead and the geographical extent may not have reached the level of previous world-scale conflicts, but who knows where we are headed.

It turns out that radically improved living conditions, longer and better health and mass education, all good things in their own way, have in part only served to distract us from deeper realities. They have provided a veneer. They have improved the outside, but have apparently left the inside largely untouched, unreformed and unimproved. Yes, the war is about a bad man and his enablers and acolytes. But it’s a reminder of a central truth. There is something rotten in all of us (and not just “them”) that cannot be fixed from the outside in.

As troubling as this is, the second thing is a much trickier issue to raise, and I do so hesitantly. It is profoundly disturbing in its implications. And I claim no deeper insight than anyone else, and certainly do not claim any particular or personal revelation. One of the Old Testament prophets, Habakkuk, had a real problem with what God was doing in his day. Times were tough and things were bad. God was acting in judgement on Habakkuk’s people Judah. So far so good. Habakkuk knew that Judah had become corrupt, and they had all been well and often warned. But then God told Habakkuk how He was going to judge Judah. He was going to use the Babylonians! “But how can you?”, shouted Habakkuk, “They’re even worse than us!”. There was an answer to Habakkuk’s question of course, even if it was in part “You’ll see”. Those who lost loved ones as the Babylonians swept into Judah no doubt grieved. Those who were subsequently deported, becoming strangers in someone else’s country, were no doubt aggrieved. How could God do this to us using them?

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is a bad man at the heart of the Ukraine war, who is responsible for death and suffering we haven’t seen the likes of in generations, at least not in this part of the world. And as in time Babylon was dealt with, so will the President of Russia be. “Will not the judge of all the earth do right?”. And yet it’s precisely this part of the world, Europe, that has taken the lead in proclaiming that God is an irrelevance (if He exists at all). Either He’s made up or we’ve abolished Him. But don’t worry, because we can get along without Him very happily thank you. Now, if there is a God, not the unattached, uninvolved watch-maker of the deist, but the God who is intimately involved in this very world (because He made it and sustains it), how is He supposed to respond to all of this? 

Maybe, just maybe, as well as doing what we all can to alleviate real suffering, we also need to reflect on what He might be saying to us all, even in these current events. Maybe there’s a need to reflect on our whole spiritual and moral direction and recent tradition, and look for another way. Because the track we’re on just isn’t working. It hasn’t solved the basic problem - something deep in me, in us, that no amount of environmental or educational improvement can touch or fix.

But what makes me think that there is a God, and what makes me think that he’s bothered by any of this? That’s where we come to Good Friday. If there’s anything that shows that God is not an uninterested bystander in all the mess of this world, it is that He Himself, in the person of Jesus, stepped into precisely this broken, bloodstained world. And in order to provide a means whereby the real issue could be dealt with, how to bring about the internal revolution needed in each human heart and mind, He went to neither a lecture hall nor a pulpit but to a cross. There He gave up His life in appalling circumstances, not as an illustration or an example, but as a sacrifice. Making provision for all God-ward human failure, making it possible to break the power that holds us captive, and enable a fundamental break with our personal failure where God is concerned. Making possible personal, inward, revolution and renewal This is not a new way, or a newly concocted alternative to modernism’s (or post-modernism’s) manifest failure. It’s a rediscovery of an ancient truth.

Buried in another of those “obscure” and ancient Old Testament prophets, quoted by Peter after Jesus’s resurrection, and taken up by Paul in one of his New Testament letters is a startling statement about how entry into this different, new, old, radical way is possible. And it requires Good Friday. Precisely because Jesus died on the first Good Friday and was raised on the first Easter Sunday, it is the case that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Joel 2:32; Acts 2:21; Rom 10:13).

Now that’s good, whether it's Friday or not.

Life in the pandemic XXIX Keswick in the transition…

Once again, for the second time in the pandemic, we have made our way to England’s beautiful Lake District, to the market town of Keswick. The scenery is undoubtedly spectacular, the weather tropical (this year at least), and the town itself charming. These would all be good reasons to spend a week’s holiday here. But that is not primarily why we’ve come. As regular readers (and you know who you are) of this blog will know, we are here for the Keswick Convention. For the last few years this has become part of our summer routine. I noted before that it might strike some as an odd way to spend a summer week in the 21^st Century. It is “old fashioned” in the sense that it has been running for over one hundred years, and some of the first attendees would be able to recognise what is going on. It would also strike some as old fashioned in that the subject matter has remained constant over that period. Yes, there have been changes in style, and some in format. But at its core, the key activity is the straightforward explanation of chunks of a very “old fashioned” book – the Bible. And there remains that same conviction – that the reason this is worth doing is that we are listening to God, whose Word this is (again, a very “old fashioned” notion).

There is of course one big difference this year. We are still in the midst of a global pandemic. Not that this is Keswick’s first pandemic, having survived the 1918 Spanish Flu. Last year, while we still came to Keswick (to walk and read), there were no meetings, although there was an online offering. But this year, once again, several thousand gather twice a day, for the morning “Bible Reading” and the evening “Celebration”. There are the now familiar markers of the pandemic – testing and masking. But transition, as well as virus, is in the air. On the first Monday of the first week, the legal restrictions introduced in England (mandatory mask wearing and restrictions on the numbers able to meet either indoors or outdoors) were removed. One of the most onerous restrictions on Christians meeting together was also removed. For fifteen months or more, we haven’t been able to sing together. So last night we sang for all we were worth. But this is transition, so we sang behind our masks. It was still worth it.

We’ve only reached the transition of course, and the pandemic is still with us. But it is perhaps time to reflect on what it might have taught us about ourselves. There have been, and will continue to be, dark days. Lives have been lost, families have been bereaved. Many others have been scarred by the experience of days or weeks (or in some cases months) of hospital treatment, gasping for breath. And not just scarred in their memories. We’ve yet to see the full impact of long Covid, a condition that will afflict hundreds of thousands in the UK alone. But we go on, because we have to. However, for the Christian this is (or should be) about much more than biology, medicine and politics. When the media talks about lessons to be learned, what is usually meant is how governments and health systems have coped with a pandemic; what was done well, what was done badly. An examination of these issues is clearly worthwhile And in the same vein all of us can perhaps reflect on how we responded, following guidelines or otherwise, wearing masks, getting vaccinated and the like. But this is thinking at  a particular level. And if it’s the only thinking that’s going on, we’re likely to draw only partial conclusions and learn partial lessons.

It has always seemed folly to me to draw direct lines between awful events, even big ones, and the judgment of God (discussed previously here). I don’t have the insight of an Amos or Jeremiah. But the pandemic is an event of global scale. It might, and probably will, be explained eventually by things like human skulduggery, incompetence, and individual and collective stupidity. But the ability of a virus that, while not benign is certainly not the most dangerous, to bring complete global dislocation must at a minimum say something about the basic fragility of modern life. Indeed, the pandemic has surely alerted us that to the fact that some of the most welcome aspects of modern life have amplified the dangers posed by the virus itself. International air travel, a boon to education, commerce and leisure in recent years, has facilitated rapid, global spread of the virus and its variants. The internet and social media, which have so improved communication and information transmission, have been used to transmit conspiracy theories and vaccine scepticism, depressing take-up in some quarters, with the attendant increased risk to health and life. Yes, science and technology have provided remarkably effective vaccines in a record short time, and this has saved lives. But the basic point stands – modern life is fragile, more fragile than we realised, and perhaps in some ways more fragile than in the past.

The virus is one evolving global tragedy, but it come at the time of of another - climate change. The UK Met office issued its first “extreme heat warning” this week. This follows record hot temperatures in North America, and freak summer floods in continental Europe. These events have either cost lives or are projected too. This is on the back of other disturbing evidence of the climate change scientists have been warning about for decades. The human cause of climate change is much less disputable than the proximate cause of the pandemic. Over decades rather than years, we face the severe consequences of what we have been doing to the planet. The scale of the action required to mitigate the effects of these action has begun to foment protests. But there is no sign of most of us really getting our heads round what is required to avoid what is coming. Much of this can be understood in (far from simple) naturalistic terms. Models can be built. Projections made. But are there deeper lessons?

For what its worth, here is my tentative thinking so far. The Bible closes with the book of Revelation, in which, among other things, a series of disasters is described. I had always thought of these as occurring over short periods of time, with a purpose that was quite obvious to those experiencing them. As a reader of Revelation I know that they serve to demonstrate to the whole of humanity that ignoring God, rebelling against Him, and living without reference to Him is self-defeating and ultimately only leads to unescapable judgment. Unfortunately, this isn’t the lesson that is learned from those suffering them. However, Revelation is highly symbolic and there is nothing in the text that demands that what is outlined occurs over short periods. So could infolding disasters like the pandemic and climate change, be two such calls to reassess where we stand in relation to the God who created the world that we are despoiling?

We appear to be in a transition out of the pandemic at least. The practical, political and medical lessons should all be learned. We’ll see if they are. But the clamour and rush for a return to “normality” should not drown out deeper lessons that could be, and perhaps need to be learned.

Life in the pandemic XXII: Easter Reflections - Singing in the darkness..

Last year at Easter we were just getting used to lockdown – working from home, one hour’s exercise a day and the rest. It made for an interesting Good Friday reflection on self-isolation. It’s sobering to think that was “Life in the pandemic III” – this is XXII!. There was lot’s we didn’t know then, that we do know now. And yet big questions remain unanswered. Perhaps they are not the same big questions for everyone, although there is likely to be an overlap. We would all like to know things like where the virus came from, how it crossed into the human population, and whether the right things were done at the appropriate time to prevent its spread (although the answer to the last of these seems clear enough). In the meantime, we’ve done what we had to do. Lockdowns, shielding, masks and of course vaccines. We’ve been right to do all we can to protect ourselves, our families and our communities. But at least for me there is that deeper, somewhat nagging question as to what the pandemic “means”. One year on from arguing that such a question is legitimate, I confess that I still have no definitive answer.

Some would argue that this is because such a question is misconceived. That was essentially N.T. Wright’s take on the situation from an avowedly Christian (if probably provocative) perspective. Others might argue that because there’s no one to address such a question of meaning or purpose to, there’s no point posing it at all. If there can be no answer, then there can be no question. And yet it still lurks. And it has struck me throughout the pandemic that even among Christians there has been relatively little discussion of the pandemic’s meaning. Perhaps no one wants to be seen to exploiting a catastrophe and tragedy for polemical purposes. Certainly, I accept that the tone of any such discussion is important. So much suffering should not be met with flip or glib statements that gloss over complexities. Even if legitimate answers can be given, it’s important they’re not given in a hubristic, superior, “told you so” tone. My view, for what it’s worth, remains that there is meaning to be found in these dark months. As answers go, it may not be particularly comforting, and it will still leave lots of subsidiary answers to be ferreted out. But answer, and meaning, there is.

Before coming to what it is, it should be noted that Wright had a wider point to make in his article that is worth pondering. For while he thought looking for the “big” answer to the “big” question, looking for an explanation, was folly, there was a distinctive Christian response to the pandemic. Particularly in the midst of global disaster, surrounded by uncertainty and fear, there is a key response and resource available to the believer. It is found in the concept and practice of lament. Lament is in part an articulation of the confusion and pain we are suffering individually and collectively. Even if at the moment we feel that things are improving with the vaccine roll-out and easing of restrictions, many continue to struggle with long-COVID, and grieving continues for the 120 000 plus who have lost their lives. So there’s lots to lament about. And lament may have undertones of complaint and anger. But it’s more than that. All of us cry, and all of us can complain. But for the Christian who relies on the Living God who is sovereign and loving, there is something else that is the a feature of lament – an active choosing to trust.

By some accounts about a third of the Psalms in the Old Testament are laments. And there is a whole OT book that is a lament, called (not surprisingly) Lamentations. It is no accident that many of the Psalms of lament, almost regardless of where they begin, end with an affirmation of hope in, or praise for, the God to whom they are directed. It is also no accident that right in the middle of Lamentations, in the middle of the third chapter of a five chapter book, the writer tells us that he has hope, and why he has hope (Lam 3:22-27). What he says is neither glib nor vague. His hope is grounded, precise and active. “The Lord is my portion…therefore I will hope in Him” (Lam 3:24). It's not that his questions have been answered now. But he also tells us that even in the midst of confusion, and questions, and pain “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord” (Lam 3: 26).

Jesus was no stranger to the laments. And of course, we remember that in the midst of the darkness (figurative and literal) of the cross, he took on His lips those words of lament from Psalm 22 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”. There’s a question. It must have hung heavily in the air, apparently unanswered. But Peter tells us that Jesus “..continued entrusting Himself to Him who judges justly” (1 Pet 2:23). Trusting, even in the absence of an answer.

I take Wright’s point. Part of our response to the pandemic is not to forget the suffering of the last year, but to lament, to sing even in the darkness. That said I think, as with the cross, so with the pandemic. There is meaning and there is an answer to the big question. Both involve a curse. The pandemic is a reminder that this is a cursed world, despite our best efforts to insulate ourselves from said curse. Because it is cursed, although there are flashes of beauty, grace, happiness and peace to be found, these tend to be fleeting. But it will not always be so. There will be a reckoning and there needs to be rescue. And that’s why we sing in the darkness of “Good” Friday. Jesus, by taking that very curse on Himself, provides the basis for our rescue. And He laments, so that one day we won’t have to. We will hear an echo, a hint, of the new song that one day will replace all of our laments, when the darkness is displaced by the sunrise. We sing in the darkness of Friday. But Sunday’s coming.  

Life in the Pandemic XVII: Truth, like gravity, cannot forever be denied…

Time for the inevitable post-Christmas return to the pandemic. And while there was light at the end of the tunnel, it has dimmed somewhat. While this is partly down to the virus itself (i.e. with the emergence of new strains), it is also due to “human” factors. There has been a concatenation of politics and pandemic. And chickens, to change the metaphor from tunnels, have been coming home to roost. All this makes for a discomforting experience.

In the US we have had the outworking of four or five years of the lies and myths perpetrated by the outgoing President, his sycophants and his supporters. The biggest and most recent of the lies was of course that the US presidential election had been stolen from him. That big lie was laid on a carefully prepared foundation consisting of smaller lies repeated for months; that foundation rested on the bedrock of years of more lies about hoaxes, fake media, the perceived crimes of others in the Washington swamp (which is now much swampier) and the claimed manifest failures of his predecessors. Inspired by an almost entirely false narrative, the Donald assembled (in the words of Republican Congress-woman Liz Cheney), then roused a crowd to fever pitch and dispatched it to the Capitol. There then ensued mayhem, violence, death and (limited) destruction. The Capitol, of course, survived. The Congress, although interrupted, discharged its final duty of this presidential election cycle and counted and certified the votes of the electoral college that actually elects the US president and vice president. This act confirmed the truth of the situation: Biden won the election, and it wasn’t even particularly close. So US democracy, while somewhat bruised, also survived. Providence, it seems, has delivered large swathes of US evangelicalism from itself, and Donald Trump will have to slink south to his resort in Florida, probably around the 20^th January, the day of the inauguration the he predicted would never happen.

Much of this served to divert attention from what the virus was up to in the US. Apparently largely unaided by the new, more transmissible variant that has been afflicting the UK, infections, hospitalisations and deaths from COVID19 continued to climb; daily new cases of more than 200 000, daily deaths of the order of 4 000, with rates increasing. The credit that the Trump administration deserves for playing its role in the rapid development of vaccines, has been squandered by the spluttering vaccination effort. With the top of the Federal government apparently paralyzed by Trump’s fixation with the election steal that never was, the States and local authorities have struggled with the practicalities of vaccinating a population, a good proportion of which is, again, in denial. The incoming Biden administration hasn’t sought to minimize the scale of the tragedy that is unfolding and will begin its struggle shortly. But the situation is as bad as it is because of lies and denial.

Meanwhile, back here in Blighty, we’ve had a new lockdown to combat our very own new COVID19 variant. Things may now be stabilising or slightly improving. And vaccination efforts do seem to be proceeding well. Not without hiccups and a degree of argument of course. But credit where it’s due, progress is being made. It’s not pandemic lies that are the problem here, it’s the Brexit lies that are beginning to be revealed for what they were. This is evidenced by disrupted supply chains, major alterations in the economics of some type of business, actual (not virtual) barriers to trade, and empty supermarket shelves, particularly in Northern Ireland. All predictable, all predicted, and all dismissed as scaremongering. Of course it is claimed by some that these are just “teething problems”. It is also true that the pandemic has been further complicating matters. Whisper it softly, the pandemic will probably be blamed for some of the economic impact that should be laid at the door of Brexit. But the existence of the new non-tariff checks on goods flowing from GB to NI, forming precisely the type of “border in the Irish sea” that Boris and others claimed would never exist, has nothing to do with the pandemic.

Truth works a bit like gravity. Gravity can be difficult to describe and define. In part this is because it is just a given of our existence. We don’t usually need to give it much thought, and of course, for millennia, no-one did. It can be easily denied, although none of us really has any reason to deny it. But it is as easy as saying “gravity doesn’t exist”. If pushed, a gravity denier could think of situations which appear to provide evidence that it is a made up thing. After all, don’t aeroplanes rather give the lie to this all-pervading, all-encompassing force? Except of course, it turns out, that they don’t. Such a view would be based on ignorance about both gravity and aeroplanes. Ignorance of course, appears to not be a problem these days, and is positively encouraged by some. Sometimes, deniers resort not to denial, but to confusion and contradiction. It might seem that whether gravity does or does not exist isn’t something any of us should get upset about. If I believe it does exist, and you believe that it doesn’t, then provided you’re not hurting me or mine what does it matter? The problem with this is that sooner or later it will matter, and perhaps in a critical situation, like when standing at a precipice, or at the top of a flight of stairs. Gravity will exert its effects, regardless of denials. It is a way things are. There are true and untrue states of affairs; there is truth and the denial of truth – lies.

One can tell lies for a while, and to some advantage. The problem is that eventually truth, like gravity, will assert itself. That’s because it is woven into the fabric of the universe, and indeed the fabric of our minds. The basic notion of truth in absolute sense has been under attack for a surprising long time. One of the more obvious manifestations of this attack currently (other than almost anything Donald Trump claims) is the deconstructionist form of post-modernism. Truth even if it exists, if expressed in words is unknowable. The problem is deconstructionists expect their own words to successfully communicate their meaning of deconstructionism, they expect them to be regarded as true.  That is presumably why they seek to communicate their ideas in dense, indigestible, texts. Either they don’t really believe their own creed or is it self-defeating. In any case truth, while perhaps hard to define, and easy to abuse, as a concept continues to be understood and as a principle continues to operate. We will all find that in the long runs lies will not work, and they won’t satisfy.

Of course the issue of truth and lies goes to the very heart of the human condition. It was truth that was under attack in Eden; the apple was just a means to an end. Paul’s critique in the letter to the Romans is that humanity “..exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator..” (Romans 1:25). The answer was to send “truth” in the form of a person - Jesus (John 14:6). Sometime we are happier settling for the lie, or claiming that it’s all to difficult to work out what truth is. Even with truth literally standing in front of him, Pilot still asked “What is truth”? (John 18:38). Almost as pointless as asking “what is gravity” and trying to live as though it doesn’t apply to you.

Christmas 2020: In the pandemic………

Twists and turns. Just a few days ago the exciting news of the roll out of COVID19 vaccinations had us all thinking that things were on the turn. Then came the twist: the virus has mutated in a way that makes it more transmissible, if not necessary more deadly. This has led to a tightening of restrictions in the UK around what we can and cannot do this Christmas. Arrangements made after the previous loosening of restrictions will have to be broken. We had one son in transit when the tightened restrictions were announced and a daughter north of the “closed” Scottish border in a quandary. I can think of worse places to be stuck, but it is an unwelcome and unpleasant quandary none-the-less. But all of this should remind us once again; life is fragile and we’re not entirely in control – any of us.

It should also prompt the asking of those big questions, what is going on and why? There are a whole load of different ways you could answer the first of those questions, depending on what you think is being asked. In recent months it has had, at least publicly for the politicians, a narrow focus. A pandemic has happened (as has frequently been predicted), but we are going to be fine eventually because science, technology and good logistics will come to our aid. There is a problem, but we can fix it, and most of us are going to return to some sort of  fairly acceptable “normality”. On this reading of the situation, the other question – why – also has a narrow focus. It distils down to a set of factual questions about what sparked the pandemic and how it developed. It can be answered with reference to wet markets in China (or even dodgy virology labs), and government inaction or incompetence. It can be padded out with reference to the proportion of the population infected and the number of lives lost. Economic damage can be quantified in the currency of your choice or in terms of the proportion of GDP lost. The methods used and the time taken to develop and deploy vaccines can be described and measured. In some ways this narrow approach has a lot to recommend it. At a time of stress and anxiety, it restores some sense of understanding and control. We have recovered from catastrophes before and life has gone on; it always does and it always has to.

Of course these narrow questions and their answers have the disadvantage that for most of us, even if we are comforted by them, we are also likely to be slightly disconcerted. They leave nagging doubts lurking in the recesses of our minds and imaginations. The narrow approach leaves out of the account other questions and answers, those that pertain to motives and values, deeper causes and their more troubling effects. This is where, as I’ve pointed out before, science is of limited help. Even before we get to what might be called questions of deep causation, we already have the questions raised by the crippling inequalities revealed by the pandemic. While some may fret because their Christmas skiing trip has had to be abandoned, there are parents wondering whether there will be food for both them and their children tomorrow lunchtime, or will they have to fast while their children eat? This is before we get to big cross-continent and cross planet issues like who gets which vaccine when and for how much. Are such inequalities inevitable? And even if they are, why are they? Why, in this world will the poor always be with us? It is easy to understand why the narrow approach is the more comforting one, even if the comfort it supplies is cold and tinged with guilt.

And yet, even this level of discourse still seems to miss something. Perhaps an outside perspective is needed. But where might we obtain a perspective which is outside all of humanity? The starting point is the realisation that we are not all there is, and we are not all that matters. To this end, it is this time of year that supplies some of the necessary resources. We should regard the appearance of the pandemic as a global signpost. But I’ve been obsessing about the signpost and not what it points to: precisely that humanity is in trouble and cannot fix itself. The world at all levels is neither what it could be, but beyond that is not as it should be. And of course there is somewhere I can turn that will explain this. The opening chapters of Genesis in the Bible are clear: this is a cursed world. In such a world, bad things happen. This implicates all of us, and we can do little but suffer the effects if we depend on out own resources. And yet into this cursed world, someone voluntarily comes who is Himself not cursed. That is what is going on in Bethlehem. But to stop at Bethlehem is to suffer from perpetual baby syndrome. Bethlehem was only a prelude to the main event in which Jesus, the man the baby became, was Himself cursed. That did not immediately remove the curse and its effects from the rest of us; pandemics obviously still happen. But it was the fulfilment of a long made promise that the curse would be dealt with and an escape provided. And at a time still future to us, it will be entirely removed in the establishment of a new (uncursed) heaven and earth. It is here that we find both the deeper questions, but also the answers to them.

Of course I know that my way of framing these issues is now somewhat counter-cultural (to say the least). In polite and educated circles, only "natural" questions and answers are allowed. Well, you can stick with the narrow, technical, natural approach if you wish. But in the promise delivered in Bethlehem is to be found the answer to both what and why whatever twists and turns lie ahead.

Life in the Pandemic XVI: The light at the end of the tunnel

The great sulk continues in the actual Whitehouse. The great contrast with the Bartlett Whitehouse continues (yes, I know it’s made up, but I’m still enjoying it). The great pandemic continues. Indeed in the land of the Whitehouse it is getting unbelievably worse. Each day in the US literally thousands are now dying, with the numbers still growing. No slick drama could cover this misery. Or the tearful frustration of healthcare workers at the end of their endurance pleading with people and politicians alike to do what can easily be done to ease the situation. We have our moments on this side of the Atlantic, and have endured our own share of political chaos and incompetence during the pandemic, but it does not seem to have reached quite the proportions of the Trumpian dystopia in the US. However, a light has now appeared at the end of the COVID tunnel.

Thanks to a remarkable effort and a ton of public money, there is now good evidence of no less than three effective vaccines, and slightly weaker evidence for at least two more. These have already been used on tens of thousands of people in various clinical trials. In the UK the first vaccine was authorised for use on the 2^nd December, and the needles were stuck in the first arms earlier this week. There are lots of people who deserve lots of credit for these achievements. Those who pioneered some of the underlying science behind the “Pfizer” and “Moderna” vaccines certainly deserve credit because they have come up with a new way of designing and producing vaccines which, at least in this case, appear to be amazingly effective. In the case of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine (not far from approval now), science plus some inspired guesswork appear to have produced the most usable of these initial vaccines. Because of its simpler production, ease of transport and robustness, this is the one that will perhaps have the most global impact. (Some) politicians and the regulators deserve credit too. There appears to have been little haggling over funding to push forward with trials, and real cooperation to expedite both trials and approvals without compromising safety. If there has been a conspiracy, it has been to advance as quickly and safely as possible, and it has achieved something of real and lasting benefit. And for once those on the outside of the rich, industrialised and wealthy world have not been forgotten. Yes, I’m sure grubby politics and grubbier economics will soon reassert themselves, but for now it’s worth smiling about much of this. But, of course, it is just the start.

There is a world of difference between a vaccine and vaccination. The real value of the work that has been done will only be realised when the vaccines end up in peoples’ arms. There are lots of other people we will need to rise to meet a whole different heap of challenges before we approach the end of the pandemic tunnel. Manufacturing enough vaccine for close to the whole human population of the planet is hardly trivial. Production problems have already reduced the rate at which the newly approved Pfizer vaccine can be rolled out in the UK. And after making the stuff, it has to be transported, and then distributed. For the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines this is a challenge because they appear to be rather delicate requiring very cold transportation and storage temperatures, and minimal handling. That's why it’s the Oxford vaccine, which is slightly more robust and happy at roomish temperatures, will probably have the global impact. Once all of these challenges have been overcome, there is the issue of the population’s willingness to bare their arms.

This will all take time. So for at least the next few months most of us will need to do what the media claims we’re all sick of doing. The routine of facemasks, social distancing, handwashing and lots of working from laptops at home where we can, will all have to continue. Restrictions on activities we all used to take for granted will also continue. And if we don’t stick to this, more people will die than would otherwise be the case. Maybe, just maybe, next summer we might be returning to something akin to what we used to think of as normality. The virus won’t have disappeared of course. And we don’t know how quickly our new-found, vaccine stimulated immunity will. So care will still be needed. There remain many unknowns. In reality we have a distance to travel in the tunnel, and the light, while reasonably bright, isn’t stellar yet.

Which brings me to what I’ve been reflecting on. The COVID tunnel is far from humanity’s longest or darkest. COVID vaccines, impressive as they are, are no solution to our biggest problem. Indeed, although they are vital, it would be a great mistake to indulge in any collective hubris about our achievements, before moving on to some other issue. After all, it was almost certainly human activity that led to the pandemic in the first place. And before most of us adopt a smug attitude because we know whose fault it all is (or think we do), there’s plenty of collective blame to go around for all sorts of abuses that have exacerbated the pandemic. Some of the very same things may well lead to the next global disaster. And that’s all before we get to other things like the climate crisis. It turns out that the inevitable progress of humanity has never been inevitable at all. And sometimes progress is not as progressive as is claimed. In economics, poverty abounds and seems only to shift rather than decline (although statistically until the pandemic progress had been made). In health as we’ve seen, old diseases may be conquered (if not eradicated) but new ones emerge. Even although poverty, illness, war and famine are avoidable, we manage not to avoid them. There are lots of good things that we can now do which previous generations didn’t even dream about. But for all that we appear to be largely stuck.

Maybe this is because fundamentally humanity’s big problems aren’t intellectual or technical. Therefore the really big issues do not have intellectual or technical solutions. The nub of our problems are moral, and beyond that, spiritual. The real tunnel we’re naturally stuck in is that we’re just not what or who we are supposed to be. But particularly at this time of year, we remember a light that appeared. And it appeared not at the end of our tunnel, but in the middle of it. It would be hard to put it better than John put it at the beginning of his Gospel:

^9 “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. ¹¹ He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. ¹² Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— ¹³ children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” John 1:9-13

Note to self: It’s time I stopped fixating on the pandemic, and considered again the events that culminated in the arrival in this very world of Jesus, who came to illuminate the way out of this very tunnel.

Life in the Pandemic XIII: Living, doing and knowing……

Here in the England’s northwest, the second wave has well and truly arrived. In Liverpool, our cases and hospitalisations are up and rising, and we have just had new restrictions imposed on us. I have discussed modelling and predictions previously, but we didn’t need a model to predict the predicament we now face. In the Spanish ‘flu pandemic of 1918/19 there are reckoned to have been three waves, with later waves more deadly than the first. Talk of the second wave of COIVD19 has been around since the early summer. In France case numbers began to climb in early August, and deaths (still mercifully low) in September. In Spain it was slightly earlier (and may be receding now). The actual number of cases detected is not the key statistic to focus on because it depends on the testing regime, but the trajectory is clear enough (you can see the relevant plots in the Worldometer Coronavirus site). But, given we’re now into month nine of the pandemic (if we assume it started for real in February), and given the effort that has gone into learning about this new virus, why are we again on the verge of major lockdowns, with all the misery and damage such a state of affairs implies?

It’s not that we haven’t learned anything. The spread of the virus has been followed and probed and information about how transmissible it is has been gleaned. Spread is not just dependant on the properties of the virus, but on the characteristics of the populations exposed to it. But this too is increasingly well understood. How the virus is spread, how long it can survive in the air and on surfaces, have also been the subject of study and debate. And of course who is likely to (and not likely to) get seriously ill, be hospitalised, need ventilation and in some cases die, is now better understood. There are now treatment options available to combat both the virus and its effects, which of course the President of the United States recently availed himself of. All of this hopefully means that in second and subsequent waves, fewer will die than in the first wave, at least proportionately. We are about to find out. And on the horizon there are multiple vaccines, although decent evidence of their efficacy is still not available, and their arrival is not certain.

Perhaps more important than all of this is that we’ve known for months how to combat the virus, and its spread, in inexpensive, simple and effective ways. These are methods that almost all of us are capable of adopting, and in practical terms they don’t interfere too much with all the things we all have to do day to day in our daily lives. Currently in the UK they can be summarised using the Government mantra of “hands, face, space”. Frequent handwashing, wearing facemasks and keeping a reasonable distance between folk from different households, if followed by most of us, would have perhaps saved thousands of lives in the first wave (when effective treatments were still being developed), would have prevented the expected second wave (probably), and could still save thousands of lives now that we are in the midst of the second wave. At least in the UK these measures remain relatively uncontroversial, unlike in the US where they’ve got caught up in politics. So what’s the problem?

The problem is us, all of us. Most of us, as individuals, haven’t experienced the virus (yet). We may have heard of friends or family members who have experienced it first hand, but in many cases their experience was of a mild illness. And although daily cases in the tens of thousands sounds like a lot, it is a small proportion in a population of millions. And even this low level of actual experience is very patchy. The media have worked hard to expose us to the sights and sounds of the trouble the virus can cause. But this is relatively out of kilter with the lived experience of most of us, and comes from a media that various segments of the population distrust. Many appear just not to get it (as an example see this report). None of this is to deny the seriousness of the virus, or to in any way minimise the experience of those who have lost loved ones to it. There are far too many of them (more than there should have been). But it remains the case that this experience, horrible and tragic as it is, is a minority experience. And the problem is that we live in a culture which prioritises experience over knowledge. So while “science” is relatively clear, and the warnings that flow from it are fairly dire, many feel that none of this really applies to them. They will escape and don’t have to heed the warnings. Mask wearing and the rest of the actions they should take, don’t have to be taken too seriously. There isn’t really a need to err on the side of caution.

The problem then becomes one of compliance; we know what we should do, we know what the “scientists” say we should do. Their claim is that if we do these simple things across the population, there is abstract information showing that it will be a good thing and lives will be saved. But we just don’t do it.  Compliance falls. And it is always easier to blame others for the situation that results from this. “Others” may be culpable of course. Government may have been inconsistent, the elite may have got away with flouting rules, some of the modelling may have overstated the impact of the first wave, and all of the modelling comes with a degree of uncertainty. All this may be true, but while it may provide me with excuses for not doing what I should be doing (because it’s mildly inconvenient), none of these are reasons. Meantime, cases, hospitalisations and deaths all climb, although much of this was probably avoidable. My “truth”, what is true for me based on my actual experience, trumps the truth.

Given all of this, I find it completely understandable, that when I try to explain the existence of a whole other aspect of reality, folk are generally sceptical. I concede that the idea that a person who died a long time ago and a long way away has any relevance to anyone today is, on the face of it, far fetched. And as for the claim that the same person came back to life, and that His death and life have both personal and cosmic significance? Well I can see why this might not all compute. And of course, all of my evidence for this is beyond experience, and comes from an ancient book. All this in a culture that prioritises experience over truth. I see the problem.

Doesn’t mean it’s not all true of course.

Life in the Pandemic XII: What lies ahead?

No human being can tell the future. Lot’s of us try to guess the future, and claim that we’re making a prediction. If enough of us do that enough times, someone is  going to guess well and apparently predict the future correctly. But this will be apparent rather than real. There are those who make a living out of (apparently) predicting the future. This is not because they are good guessers, and it’s certainly not because they know something not knowable by the rest of us.  Often it’s because their “predictions” are so vague as to be interpretable as being fulfilled by something at some time. Of course this means that there are also so vague as to be of no practical use. Perhaps the best evidence of this is that they make their living making “apparently” reliable predictions, not by actually predicting winning lottery numbers or placing big bets on unlikely events. And of course because of selection and confirmation biases, we tend not to notice the predictions that aren’t, and take to twitter about their successful guesses.

Deep down in the pandemic we’ve all become familiar with another kind of prediction. From early on the media has been awash with dire warnings based on the reporting of predictive scientific models used to project the future course of the pandemic. Some of these have been extremely influential. The Imperial College model developed by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team is credited with persuading the UK Government to enforce a UK-wide “lockdown” back in March. Their model suggested that without appropriate suppression of the virus the UK might be facing up to 500 000 deaths, breaking the healthcare system and devastating the economy. However, this model, and models in general, have been fiercely criticized in some quarters as being scarcely an improvement on Mystic Meg. It’s claimed that they are not only failing now, but have performed poorly in the past.

But it’s important to understand what scientific models do and don’t do. Firstly they are inevitably based on what is known when they are constructed and on assumptions. Even what is known is usually not known with certainty or great precision, so choices always have to be made leading to uncertainty being baked in to any model. Where important information is missing, then assumptions have to be made. Bad assumptions lead to a poor model. Secondly, no model captures everything; any model is a simplification. It is, after all, a model and not reality. Uncertainties around inputs, plus simplifications in construction, mean that the outputs of any model tend to provide a range of possible outcomes, along with estimates of precision. Even in a model that perfectly captured all that was going on in a given situation, small changes of input assumptions and parameters, would have a big effect on outputs. There are no certainties to be found here, just sets of likelihoods. This is better than guessing, and may offer a way of avoiding complete disaster, but it is not a means of predicting the future with precision and certainty. And models are not proscriptive they are ultimately descriptive. They don’t tell how things must be; they describe how they might be.

However, as with other situations in life, it’s important not to confuse our inability to know everything, with the inevitability of knowing nothing. It’s not that we know nothing about the future course of the pandemic. If we take certain actions then the course of the pandemic will be altered in certain ways.  Not being able to know everything about the future, is not the same as being totally ignorant of the future. So what are we to make of where we are and what’s going on? The pandemic is a perspective-shaping event. It should have reminded us all of how fragile our lives, both individually and collectively, are. It has forced a re-evaluation of what really matters. And that re-evaluation should include considerations about where things are headed.

It seems to me that we are at an intersection of events that are significant. In addition to the pandemic, there are other events that are worth pondering. Earlier in the year Australia was ablaze. According to ABC News, over the 2019/20 Australian summer over 30 million acres went up in smoke, killing animals in their hundreds of millions, and affecting the health of a large proportion of the human population. This would be bad enough. But in the western US over the last few weeks, forest fires in unprecedented numbers and of unprecedented size have already destroyed of the order of 4 million acres and are still burning fiercely. Add to that fires in the Amazon and Siberia, and you have impacts on a planetary scale. This is likely to exacerbate the climate impact of human activity, about which we have heard much in recent years. To public health and climate events, add the political instability now been seen in what has historically been a politically stable country, the US. It’s hard to underestimate just how troubling Donald Trump’s recent pronouncements about the peaceful transition of power have been. This is playing with fire of a very different kind. In the worlds largest economy and most powerful military power this matters to us all. It might just be the craziness of one strange individual. But, taken together all of these goings on seem to be very unlike business as usual.

Given what I’ve already said about prediction, I am not now going to claim any special knowledge on my part that can illuminate where we are and what’s going on. But it is perhaps worth pointing out that there is a source of knowledge available to all of us that is always worth taking note of. My conviction is that neither history nor the future just happen; they have a shape and a trajectory, and we needn’t be completely ignorant of either. Underpinning and driving all that has and will happen is the God who reveals His purposes in His word, the Bible. If you’re looking for key explanations this is where to turn. And you’ll find a prediction or two. Because while none of us knows what’s ahead, this isn’t such a big deal for a God who is eternal.

One final aside. One of the odd by-products of the pandemic, is that it's easier than even to lurk unseen in church services. If taking God and the Bible strike you as strange but you're intrigued, there are lots of places you can find out more. We'll be "at church" shortly; feel free to join us online.

Life in the Pandemic XI: Why science can never be enough.

In the interests of transparency, I should make clear from the outset that I think science is, without doubt, the best way of obtaining sound answers to certain types of questions. And just at the moment, some of those questions are pressing. Here in the pandemic we desperately need to know whether convalescent plasma treatment works, and if it does, how well.  We need to know if any of the vaccines currently being investigated confer immunity to the SARS-COV-2 virus, and if so, how long that immunity lasts. Despite claims by the Presidents of both the US and Russia, these questions remain open. The only way they can be answered is properly constructed clinical trials, which are ongoing. The answer/s will come when they come. Spin, propaganda, political will or economic desperation will not bring them any sooner. Such claims as have been made, appear to be based on political considerations and (sometimes wilful) ignorance, and those making these claims are seeking to exploit the ignorance of the population at large. That they have been perpetrated at all is just one line of evidence that science on its own is never enough.

Part of the problem is that science does not take place in any kind of vacuum, be it political, cultural or ethical (the one exception being science done in a vacuum!). It is a human activity carried on by human beings. Its results, and what flows from them, be those novel medical treatments, new technology, or new answers to age-old questions and problems, have to be understood and then used (where they have a use) by human beings. While as an institution and community science is, at least over the medium term, fairly critical and self-correcting, it can and has produce flawed results and wrong answers. The practitioners of science (ie scientists) are, as individuals, as flawed and fickle as the rest of humanity. Most try to practice their science in a competent, professional and serious way. A minority are known to have behaved fraudulently, with the intent to deceive, usually for some sort of gain. There is sense in which science is under attack from within by this minority. And their activities devalue the whole enterprise. It certainly means that the scientific enterprise is much less efficient than it might be. However, it also risks bringing the whole scientific enterprise into public disrepute (much as has occurred with journalism and politics). So, to bolster science’s self-regulation and self-correction functions, various mechanisms have been introduced, like the US Office of Scientific Integrity or academic and scientific integrity processes in individual institutions. But policing science, practicing it properly, upholding commitments to honesty, decency and transparency, is not a scientific matter, it’s a matter of ethics. And ethics isn’t science. These things really matter for the continuing ability of science to get good answers to tough questions. But they are not themselves scientific. Another example of science on its own not being enough.

Science’s foundations, its method/s (there isn’t “a” scientific method), and lots of elements of its practice are also not themselves “scientific”. What I mean is that they do not proceed along those classic lines from hypothesis, to predictions, to tests and measurement leading to results. They are the stuff of starting assumptions and a necessary framework of commitments that make science work. If science had been proved not to work, then I suppose they would have come under more scrutiny. But now they are so baked in they have become invisible. Philosophers and historians of science have largely given up trying to crack “the” mystery of how science works because so much of it is about all this invisible, intellectual “dark matter”. But this is another way in which science on its own isn’t enough. Scientific method, properly conceived, isn’t entirely scientific.

One of the things science is really good at is making measurements in an organised and objective way, so that the results once obtained can command widespread agreement. This isn’t just about the results themselves, but it’s also about the scrutiny that all scientific results have to be placed under. This is the sort of community activity most commonly seen in the processes of publishing scientific results via peer review, exposure at conferences and the like. This is a key part of the process that leads to sound knowledge in any given field which provides the launchpad for the next phase of progress. In a given field, once the basics are established, there’s no need to go back to square one each time, and so effort can focus on extending and refining explanations and knowledge, making them more powerful in the process. But as powerful as scientific explanations and knowledge might be, they only provide information about, and control over, natural processes by way of statements of facts. The conundrum is that usually this is not really what interests people. David Attenborough documentaries about the state of the planet only get you so far. What occupies most people most of the time isn’t the answer to the what and how questions, but the answer to why questions. And establishing what “is”, is far from establishing what “should be”. We may be cooking the planet, we may be imperilling biodiversity on a global scale. But beyond the notion that might not be in our long term health or economic interests, why is this a bad thing? That’s not a question of science, but a question of values. It’s these values questions that are the important and tricky ones, and science can never give us the complete answer to them.

And here’s the real kicker. Science is all about reason. This is a problem. Because individually and collectively all human beings are not merely rational. Reasons other than reason often drive our behaviour and influence our decisions. Indeed, even if it were true that on average the human population did behave rationally, given human variability that simply means that there will be a lot irrationality about. And science on its own can’t help with that (beyond measuring accurately the irrationality). This type of irrationality can be viewed almost nightly on news channels where people deny the pandemic, and state quite openly that no way will they accept vaccination against the “fake flu”. Only a minority need to adopt this irrational stance (it flies in the face of the evidence), to undermine the usefulness of a C19 vaccination for everyone.

So, deep down here in the pandemic we certainly need science. It will provide us with desperately needed tools. But on its own it cannot guarantee that those tools will be used effectively. Never confuse science with salvation.

Life in the Pandemic VIII: So many goodbyes….

There are many folk who are grieving these days and having to say their goodbyes. While some probably knew the time was approaching when an older relative, spouse or friend was going to leave this life, they didn’t think it would come so soon, precipitated by an unknown virus, in the midst of a global pandemic. For others death has arrived as an unwelcome, unexpected surprise and shock. And there have been those stunned by an overwhelming sense of injustice at a young life cut tragically short. No death is just a statistic. Each one leaves grief in its wake. Every death matters, just as much as every life.

As long as there have been people, there has been death. It is the inevitable last experience of our lives here, all of which follow a pattern. We move from our earliest memories, on a journey via definable phases and critical events. Shakespeare likened life to a play (of course he did) and talked about how men and women have their  “..exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts; His acts being seven ages.”(1). Less poetically perhaps, I remember enjoying 18^th and 21^st birthday parties with friends. Then it was University graduations and rounds of weddings. There was the arrival of kids (for most), and catching up with family exploits in the occasional Christmas epistle (some of which I actually read). I’m just getting to the stage of metallic wedding anniversaries and those milestone birthdays as the decades accumulate. And also for me, now there is that gradually souring note of parents, aunts and uncles being lost; a hint of what’s to come. The deaths of celebrities and others I grew up with, some I looked up to, are becoming more frequent. The diseases of ageing are beginning to take their toll on my contemporaries. A cancer scare here and there. And instead of births and birthdays, I know it that eventually there will be funerals and condolences. And then….

Fair enough, I know that this might be a bit morbid, but I’m thinking that it needn’t be. I’ll admit that the pandemic has encouraged morbid thoughts. Daily death statistics will do that to you. But we all know that we cannot live in this world forever, even if sometime we secretly think as though death won’t come for us, only other people. In our general culture too, pre-pandemic, death had perhaps become remote, the business of various professionals, leaving the rest of us to get on with living. So thoughts of it could be suppressed, and squeezed down into the farthest, dark recesses of our minds. The pandemic has changed that, at least for the moment. But as well as the pandemic I have two other reasons that have caused me to reflect on this. The first is, as it happens, a death, the second is a book.

Last Tuesday I heard of the death of a man called Peter Maiden(2). I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t know me, although we met on a couple of occasions. He came from, and never moved far from, Carlisle (in the northwest of England, up near the Scottish border). He was widely known as the International Director of a missionary organisation called Operation Mobilisation from 2003 to 2013 (although he had been involved with OM since 1974) and he was a trustee of the Keswick Convention. I heard him teach the Bible on a number of occasions. And although I can’t honestly remember any of the specifics, what does stick in my memory is his manner – gracious, humble, straightforward. Others have been speaking and writing about his influence on them through his teaching, leadership and books. Now, to be honest, his death is not that of a close friend of relative. There are many folk who will be grieving for him in a way that I am not. But I am aware of a loss. He was one of those people who served as a marker for me along the route of my journey. Not just a marker of the way, but a marker of the destination. His teaching and living pointed to a life beyond this life, that in many ways is more important than this life. He devoted his life to sharing and teaching what he took to be the words of God. In the process he was used to influence many thousands, including me. His death is, of course, a demonstration of his mortality, but it is to me a reminder of mine. His life here has ended, something he was prepared for, knowing that more was to come. I wonder - was he deluded to think like this? Were those he influenced deluded? Was (or am) I deluded? I don’t think so.

The book I mentioned above is the snappily titled “Evangelicalism in Britain 1935-1995” by Oliver Barclay(3). I confess it wasn’t one of the ones I mentioned in my last post as being on my summer reading list. I met Oliver Barclay too, when I was a PhD student in the 1980’s, at a Research Scientists Christian Fellowship (now Christians in Science) conference. He belonged to a very different generation, but was a clear and long-sighted thinker, encourager and organiser. In particular, he played a key role in the development of the Intervarsity Fellowship (now UCCF), the organisation that links and supports Christian Unions in universities and colleges in the UK. In the book, he relates the work and struggle of many men and women, who established the evangelical culture and infrastructure that I and many others depended on as we grew and matured in our Christian thinking. There were those who ministered in churches in University cities throughout the UK, with a clear commitment to the transforming truth of the Bible. There were resources like commentaries, and books in critical areas of apologetics, written from a robust evangelical perspective. He mentions the work of many who are now obscure to many of us. And the book stops in 1995 - a quarter of a century ago. As I read Barclay’s book, I found I was reading of many who seemed like giants – Martin Lloyd Jones, J.I. Packer, John Stott and many others beside. Markers for my journey, marking it out even before it began, now receding into the distance. These  were men and women, whether I encountered them personally or not, to whom I owe a great debt. They made the way easier for me, very often at cost to themselves. They were passionate about God and His word. They lived it as well as taught it. They weren’t supermen and women, they weren’t heroes to be placed on high pedestals; every single one of them had his or her flaws. But they were critical to me and many others. And one of the keys that comes out of Barclay's book is the utter centrality of that other book. To them it was the book of God’s words, a notion that the world they inhabited derided even more strongly than it is derided today. Their conviction and claim was that by teaching it and living it, they were encountering and living for the God who made, saved and sustained them.

The book was and is the Bible (of course), and its key message is the good news (the Gospel) of Jesus Christ. When others turned their back on its truth as truth, the Maidens and Barclays and their ilk believed, lived, taught and shared it, and encouraged others to do the same. I was one of those so encouraged. And ultimately it is the Bible and the God who stands behind it and is revealed in it, that provides not just the markers along the way, but the very way itself. It is a way does not end in bereft goodbyes. Don’t get me wrong, goodbyes there are and will be. Oliver Barclay moved on from this life in  2013, and I'm sure there was sadness and loss. And there will be a funeral in Carlisle at some point soon, with grief and grieving. There will be goodbyes along my journey, until it too, reaches an inevitable destination. But the Gospel is so powerful that it transforms these goodbyes. Death here is the destination of one part of our journey, but it is not the terminus. For those of us who have encountered, trusted and followed Jesus, the goodbyes are accompanied by a transforming hope that takes us beyond death and the grave, through resurrection to safety. And they are then followed by a welcome to a whole new journey.

1. William Shakespeare. “As you like it”, Act II Scene VII.

2. For tributes see https://www.uk.om.org/InMemoryOf/peter-maiden 
or https://keswickministries.org/a-tribute-to-peter-maiden/

3. Oliver R Barclay. Evangelicalism in Britain 1935-1995. A personal sketch. IVP.
  https://ivpbooks.com/evangelicalism-in-britain-1935-1995-pb

Life in the Pandemic VII: Don’t panic, there’s still plenty of books to read…

Frank Zappa is quoted as having said “So many books, so little time”. But of course, for a while now, many of us have had considerably more time for reading than we bargained for, thanks to the pandemic and the lockdown. I’ve been going to work in my dining room for the last few months, so as it turns out I haven’t had a lot of extra reading time. But I have enjoyed a few notable (and eclectic) pandemic reads…so far.

As I’ve noted inside its front cover, my first lockdown read was Alistair McGrath’s biography of C.S. Lewis(1). To my mind both the author and the subject are interesting characters. McGrath is interesting because he began his academic sojourn in the world I am most familiar with. His initial calling was to science, eventually obtaining his Oxford DPhil in molecular biophysics. However, around the time he went up to Oxford, he discovered that there were other, complimentary ways of investigating and understanding the world around him, including theology. And it was to theology he turned, and in which he has made his mark. Lewis, along with other authors and scholars, helped him to understand his journey, and it is perhaps this that explains his interest in Lewis. McGrath’s approach as a biographer turns out to be quite scientific, because in order to master his subject, his approach was to immerse himself in the data - in Lewis’ case his published writings, broadcasts and, importantly, his letters. I came to Lewis in my teens, although I confess that I have still to read the Narnia books. My introduction to him was his science fiction trilogy (“Out of the Silent Planet”, “Voyage to Venus”, and “That Hideous Strength”) from which I moved on to books like “Mere Christianity” and “The Screwtape Letters”. What these don’t particularly reveal is much about the man himself. But McGrath does this forensically, although from a sympathetic standpoint. In doing so he reveals a complex character, flawed (as we all are) in many ways, navigating his way through two world wars and the cultural upheavals of the 20^th century. It is well worth a read.

Much harder work, but no less rewarding, was Peter Sanlon’s “Simply God”(2). This isn’t bedtime reading, but it addressed something that’s bothered me for a while. As readers of this blog will know, I’m interested in God. Admittedly my interest is more personal than academic, but that doesn’t mean I’m somehow exempt from doing hard thinking about Him. And one of the dangers I’ve become aware of is that I come to see Him as simply a bigger and better version of me. This is in part the age old issue of creating God in my image, instead of recognising that I’m created in His. Of course, I’m not alone. Arguably this is fallen humanity’s biggest and most devastating mistake, stretching all the way back to Eden and the Fall. And it’s pervasive. The “gods” of the ancient world were just big versions of their Canaanite, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman inventors. The “straw-God” of the new atheists is/was just a big version of what they observed/observe in humanity around them. More worryingly the God who is the object of some contemporary evangelical prayer and worship often seems to suffer from similar deficits. But Sanlon’s starting point is that this is a total misconception. Yes we are created in His image, but it is a fundamental mistake to see in this the idea that the difference between us and Him is quantitative. It turns out (and no real surprise here if you’ve been paying attention) that He is a totally different type of being. The gap between Him and us is way bigger than, and of a completely different order to, the gap between a person and a paramecium. This causes an obvious problem. How are we to understand Him if He is so different? Thankfully, it turns out that He has provided help towards exactly this end, because He wants to be known. So He has revealed things about Himself in ways that we can understand. Not being able to understand everything, shouldn't stop us from trying to understand something. Starting with God’s simplicity (which in this context has a particular meaning and significance) Sanlon investigates God as He is revealed. And there is an interesting subtext. I may be reading more into Sanlon’s writing than is there (for which I apologise in advance), but I think he’s fairly angry about the small of view of God that many of us carry around in our heads. I think he’s right to be angry about this (if he is). And to the extent that this book helped me to understand that my view of God had been inaccurate, weak and impoverished, I’m more than happy to apologise! Hard work, but a good read.

A third lockdown read that I’ll mention is completely different. It’s John Searle’s “Seeing Things as They Are”(3). This book has nothing to do with theology. Searle is a UC Berkeley philosopher, as far as I know not a believer, with little interest in theology. I discovered him through his “Chinese Room” argument which appeared in the late 70’s/early 80’s; this seeks to show why brains are not computers and why computers cannot be conscious (or at least conscious in the way that you and I are). He writes with a compelling and elegant clarity. Not that I would claim to always follow his arguments fully, I’m sure I miss a lot. I am after all, just a scientist not a philosopher. But I always get the feeling that there’s something in his arguments, and that it’s worth paying attention. “Seeing..” is an attempt to explain consciousness, in this case the kind of consciousness that is involved in the process of perception. While many regard consciousness as a mystery (and some have argued that it is a mystery that can’t be solved), for Searle there is no mystery, once we think about it clearly enough. The mystery results from confusing categories, and holding on to philosophical baggage and bad arguments from the past. This one’s been keeping me going for a while. So quite handy in a pandemic.

And as if this were not enough already, I’ve just ordered my holiday reads. A similarly eclectic bunch including Stephen Westaby’s “The Knife’s Edge”, George Zuckerman’s “The Greatest Trade Ever Made”, and on the theological front Peter Hick’s “Evangelicals and Truth”. So many books. But then the pandemic isn’t over.

1.       McGrath A (2013) “C.S. Lewis: A Life”. Hodder & Stoughton.

2.       Sanlon P (2014) “Simply God”. IVP.

3.       Searle JR (2015) “Seeing Things As They Are”. Oxford University Press.

Life in the Pandemic IV: Where should we place our faith?

There is a lot of faith about at the moment (something I noted previously). Some of it is obvious, some of it less so. But it’s there. Indeed it always is, because faith is indispensable to life. You might be tempted to respond to the question above by objecting that you have no faith to place. But such a response would naïve at best, and delusional at worst. Faith is woven into the fabric of our existence, as a moment’s reflection will demonstrate. Let’s start with something trivial.

You are probably sitting on a chair as you read this. How do you know that it will support your weight? You don’t. But you are trusting that it will, all the same. This is a (trivial) form of faith; a “trust in” something. Of course, you have no reason not to expect the chair to support you and you will feel that you have ample evidence from the past that it will support you. So reliable has this evidence always proved, that you would never think of weighing it carefully, or indeed of conducting a thorough investigation. If you were to take such an approach to something as straightforward as sitting in a chair, you would presumably feel it only appropriate to apply it to much else and life would quickly become intolerable. However, as David Hume, the arch sceptic and Scottish enlightenment philosopher pointed out: “It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future….”; the fact that the your chair has never collapsed under your weight before is a guarantee of precisely nothing. But you don’t care. And so you sit; serenely - or perhaps just a little less serenely that before?

You could point out that the worst that could happen, even if the worst came to the worst, would be a rapid decent to the floor from not too high a height. The result would be minimal damage, and, if you’re alone, zero embarrassment. So on the one hand there is a realistic expectation of no problem arising, because you are confident in the object of your faith (the chair). On the other hand even if a problem does arise, nothing too troubling is going to happen. This is all true. It also tells us things that are generally true about faith. It’s not so much the faith that we exercise that’s particularly important, rather it’s the object we place it in (faith is always “in” something). And the context is key; what does placing our faith in that object do for us and what would happen if it let us down?

In the pandemic we’ve all been exercising faith is spades, and it has been a matter of life and death. In fact, we’ve been exercising our faith not in a single object, but a chain of objects. The politicians have been saying repeatedly that they have been exercising faith in the scientists advising them (“do x and our model shows that y people will die as opposed to y + another big number). This advice has been closed to the rest of us. Until recently, even the names of those sitting on the SAGE committee (who thought that one up?) were unknown to the UK population. Indeed it took a campaign to have the list released. We in turn placed our faith in the politicians (ie “do x because the scientists tell us if we do x….etc”). In fact the reason why we are probably prepared to trust the second lot, was precisely because they were claiming to trust the first lot. Surveys show that by and large scientists are trusted more than politicians. So, as a population we have “done x” and the result has (probably) been fewer deaths in the pandemic so far than would otherwise have been the case. But a lot us relying on this chain of faith do not, and probably cannot, understand the science underpinning what we’re being asked to do. Hence we are exercising faith, and when it really matters.

The observation that this exercise of faith is central to what we’ve been doing recently isn’t peculiar to me; others have made it too. Eve Willis, writing in Prospect magazine, also spotted the centrality of faith to what has been going on (“During coronavirus, eventrusting in science feels like a form of faith”). While she doesn’t provide a particularly penetrating analysis (maybe she didn’t intend to), it is revealing that a self-confessed non-believer is now willing to cut us believers the sort of slack that was probably absent previously. However, she doesn’t really get faith, because one of the things she tells us is that “I increasingly fear that this pandemic will make a believer out of me..”. But in fact she is a believer already. As she touchingly continues “We simply have to trust those with expertise…”.

Her conclusion though is interesting: “The grip of a crisis demands we surrender control—and quite rightly—to forces bigger than us: the long arm of a newly-paternalistic state, the unknowable complexities of science. Why not faith, too? Find comfort where you can; we’re in this for the long-haul.”. Her argument is that faith brings comfort. If it works for you that’s fine; in current circumstances, I might try it too. And here she means faith in organised religion. I’ve noted before the importance of expertise in the current crisis. Science, limited and uncertain as the information it provides inevitably is, does provide a guide to how we get through the pandemic. It is not the only kind of analysis we need, and it won’t help us with all of the decisions we have to make. But it will take us an important part of the way.

However, any comfort you obtain from placing your faith in what cannot support it, will be temporary, unsatisfying and futile. So for the really big issues, your really should ask what, or who, are you putting your faith in. What can it (or He) really deliver? What is the evidence that as an object of faith it (or He) has delivered in the past, or is delivering in the present. My contention is that for the biggest of big issues, the answer is not to be found in a system, code or ritual. And certainly not in some blind general adherence to “religion”. Faith can save, but only if its object is the correct one.