Don't ask me how I'm feeling

Full disclosure – I’m a Scot. We have a reputation for being a dour, miserable lot. Some argue that this explains why we took to Calvinism so enthusiastically. Mind you, proving the direction of the causality (were we Calvinists because we were dour, or dour because we were Calvinists?) is probably impossible. This is all a bit unfair to both Scots and Calvinists. However, as it is emotion I'm about to discuss, I thought I had better point out I might be accused of having a problem with it!

In contemporary culture, emotion is important. We’re told to read it, explore it, own it, express it. Not to do these things is to be repressed. We don’t just need intelligence, we need emotional intelligence. How I feel is what really matters, and trumps almost everything else. Even in science, those interested in cold cognition are increasingly interested in emotion (or its proxies). How we feel is as cool a subject of study as how we think. Not all emotion is good of course. There are good and bad emotions, and the aim of modern life is to maximise the good and minimise the bad. Happiness good, sadness bad. Guilt bad, the satisfaction that flows from being self-justified, good. The “right sort” of emotional state is an objective for life. It’s healthy to pursue feeling good.

So it might be argued that it is just as well that there are churches that seem to focus on meeting this need to feel good. A recent article on the BBC website (“Hillsong: A church with rock concerts and 2m followers”; 13^th August) left me feeling that I needed to think about emotion. It ended with a quote from a young man who, for various reasons, had left Hillsong. He clearly still felt warmly towards. He was quoted as saying: 

“The music is so beautiful and uplifting and it makes you feel better. I don't think there's anything in the Bible that says we can't feel good.”

If you’ve never heard of Hillsong, it’s worth knowing that it is a rapidly growing group of churches, originating in Australia. It is perhaps best known for its music, and it has given to the church at large songs that are probably now sung somewhere every Sunday (you’ll find lots of examples on YouTube). The music and vibe attracts a mainly young audience to its large weekly gatherings, with stadium-sized conferences running more occasionally. Hillsong’s weekly live audience runs into the hundreds of thousands (if not millions), with many more watching and listening online.

The thing about music, particularly well written and well played music, is that it is a brilliant way to induce a mood, evoke an emotion, create an atmosphere. And I don’t have any problem with that. I like music, of all sorts (and play music of some sorts). It’s clearly important in church too. Christians have always sung together, taking much of their early material from the Psalms in the Old Testament, Psalms which themselves had been sung for millennia by Israel. Some of this singing is sad and poignant. But much of it is joyful and uplifting. Indeed this upbeat note is probably where the balance lies. After all, the instruction in Psalm 100 v 1 is to make a joyful noise, not a mournful one. And in the New Testament the instruction is to sing out of thankfulness; I’m assuming that this means it will be will be on the up side rather than the down. And I don't really see a problem if this really does help us feel better. So in one sense Hillsong aren’t really innovators in giving church music a key, upbeat role. But here is my problem: don’t we need something beyond feeling better, feeling good? 

Singing, particularly singing together, is powerful. But powerful enough? Maybe it would be a good idea to know why  we’re singing, and to know why we're singing what you're singing. Singing, and the feel-good factor that it can engender, doesn’t ever seem to be the primary objective in Scripture. There is nothing in the Bible that says we can't feel good. But there's lots in the Bible that suggest there are things that need attention before we get to feel good. Maybe if simply feeling good is our objective, we're missing something important. Because when singing to feel good becomes the objective, the song is all that there is. Maybe that's when the song becomes hollowed out, and becomes less than it could be. 

Something else of interest recently happened, this time among the ranks of Hillsong musicians. One of their more accomplished writers and performers decided that Christianity just may not cut it for him anymore. Posting on Instagram (since removed, but picked up by others), among other things he wrote:

“This is a soapbox moment so here I go … How many preachers fall? Many. No one talks about it. How many miracles happen. Not many. No one talks about it. Why is the Bible full of contradictions? No one talks about it. How can God be love yet send four billion people to a place, all ‘coz they don’t believe? No one talks about it. Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet—they can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people. But it’s not for me.” (quoted more extensively  here)

There’s a familiarity about this; these are issues that have been, and are, discussed, widely. They are questions that have answers. The fallibility of Christian leaders is well known and often reported (sometimes gleefully); there are websites and blogs dedicated to it. But then who was he following, or being encouraged to follow? We’re all fallible, and we all fail. That’s why the Gospel focuses not on a man, but on Jesus (who while a man, was also God). The role and reality (or otherwise) of the miraculous is another often talked about subject (some Christians seem to talk about nothing else). But miracles in the Bible, are relatively rare and usually serve a particular purpose. And that purpose is rarely evidential. Contradictions? While the claim is often made that the Bible is "full" of them, it has consistently failed to stand up to scrutiny.  The problem of suffering is a key, important and difficult issue for many, but hardly a new one. He also says: "Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion.” I admit I’m not entirely sure what this even means. But a cursory read of this blog (and much more besides) will show that science is no competitor to faith, at least not the kind of faith the Bible talks about. So what’s going on?

Could it be a simple as this: if the music’s all you’ve got, then when the music stops you’re in big trouble. If all you have is a good feeling, an uplifted mood, based on feel-good songs, this will be a  fragile and temporary state of affairs. It will not be enough to effect a fundamental change in life-direction; it will not stand the test of time, nor stand up to a skeptical and hostile culture. Maybe, after all, life is not primarily about how we feel. It has to come back to what we know. It is true that the philosophically sophisticated puritan theologian Johnathan Edwards said: “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections". But the same Psalmist who tells us to make a joyful noise, immediately sings: “Know that the Lord, he is God” (Ps 100:3). Scripture doesn't make the sort of rigid distinction between feeling and knowing that we have tended to in Western culture. Throughout Scripture knowing and feeling are linked and are not two rigid and separate categories. So all knowing and no feeling is no great improvement on all feeling and no knowing.

But it does seem to be clear that feeling (and singing) need a proper foundation. They need to spring from right knowing. To focus only on how we feel is to focus on the wrong thing, to have things the wrong way round. If we make how we feel our primary objective, we short-change ourselves. So, as Alistair Begg said once, “Don’task me how I feel, ask me what I know”. He, incidentally, is also a Scot.

What an odd thing to do on a Saturday night…

Here I was sitting in a tent on a Saturday night. Perhaps in and of itself not that odd I’ll grant. But it was a rather large tent, holding about two-thousand people. Fair enough, not unknown in the summer, even in the UK. After all, there seem to be more and more festivals popping up all the time, many of them involving tents.  But here we were on the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century, thinking about words written in the first century; seeing in those words something of relevance to the present day (and indeed the future). Nor was this a gathering of crusty old enthusiasts, a wistful looking back by a bunch of old hobbyists to a bygone and much missed era. No, this was about now. Finding in those words direction for living now, with an orientation towards an event yet to come. Much about this is really quite odd in today’s terms.

The event was of course the first evening session of the middle week of the Keswick Convention. Since 1875, Christians from a variety of denominational backgrounds have met in Keswick to hear Bible teaching. The speakers too have always been drawn from a range of backgrounds. However, at its heart has been the conviction that the Living God speaks through a book (the Bible), and so the “Bible Readings” (daily Bible-based talks often covering a single book or section of the Bible) are one of the main aspects of the convention.

Even among Bible-believing Christians, Keswick has not been without its critics. In the early days, in the late 19^th Century, it was treated with suspicion by some evangelical leaders. More recently criticism has come from the “reformed” end of the evangelical spectrum (eg see this from Kevin DeYoung). Much of this will seem overblown to your average convention goer today, who is happy to listen to a range of Bible teachers who take Scripture seriously and want to explain it simply. What’s odd is that this is still going on at all.

The culture around us is in a state of continual flux. Different movements and ideas wax and wane. On one reading of history, Christianity has been in terminal decline, at least in Western Europe, for a while. That of course was part of the great modernist project. Religion in general, and Christianity in particular belonged to humanity’s adolescence. With the arrival of the enlightenment and the achievements of science, it was time to grow up and move on. Poor modernism. It’s death was declared by the post-modernists. Then it transpired that postmodernism was a bit of a dead end, and it went into decline. In the religious sphere there was the rise of the “new” atheists. But even their demise has been announced (although they may be unaware of this).  

I first came to Keswick when I was a student. Back in 1985 (34 years ago!) a bunch of us were here when Eric Alexander taught at the Bible readings on 1 Corinthians (I still have the book somewhere). I was back last year to hear Chris Wright on Micah. In the world I grew up in as a student, Christians in general were to be tolerated, and the Bible-believing fundamentalist sort were to be pitied. But thousands of the latter type gathered at Keswick every summer. The culture in the UK has moved on. Those pesky fundamentalists are still around, but now they have to be kept out of the public square, or maligned in the cyberworld, because of their dangerous multiphobic views. But here we were in Lake District, in July, listening in a tent, on a Saturday night, to prescient warnings about such circumstances, written originally by a guy called Peter in the first century.   

This would all strike the average person as odd if it struck them at all. After all,unless you knew about the Keswick convention, you wouldn’t know about it! But think about it. The Bible is a book that has been maligned, slandered, criticised, censored, banned, misinterpreted, mistranslated and mishandled for as long as it has been around. Yet, somehow, it remains potent. I suppose you could try to make the same observation about the Quran (although it’s a relatively youthful 1400 years old) or the Communist Manifesto (somewhat out of fashion currently). And there are other books and scriptures that have their adherents. I don’t find those alternatives persuasive. I do find the Bible persuasive. It presents a coherent account properly understood of the God who is there, of His rescue mission to and for humanity, and of the demands He has on my life now. In my own local Church (Bridge Chapel in South Liverpool), its message struck a couple of individuals last Sunday with such force and vitality that the direction of their lives has been altered. They are different to me, with different backgrounds and personalities, yet somehow the message of the Bible spoke to them the same way it speaks to me. And now we now share in the same central relationship, and the same living hope that here in Keswick we were considering last night, from the first letter of Peter to a bunch of first century, first generation Christians, that he called exiles.

The people Peter wrote to were seen as odd. In their own day some called them “evildoers” (1 Pet 2:12) and they were slandered (1 Pet 3:16) and maligned (1 Pet 4:4). In contemporary non-Christian and anti-Christian writings, they were called everything from cannibals to subversives to atheists! You’ll find examples of similar things (and worse) in the Twittersphere and on the interweb. Perhaps soon we'll find the same types of charges being made against us in the non-virtual, non-cyber world. But then Jesus was seen as odd, very odd. I’m happy to share that oddness, and was happy to think about it last night in a tent at Keswick. 

Which is, when you think about it, a bit odd. 

Unless it isn’t.  

Cold fusion and hot money

It turns out that we’ve just passed the 30^th anniversary of the announcement of the most revolutionary of scientific discoveries. On 23^rd March, 1989 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons held a press conference (you can still see it on YouTube) and told the world that they had found a relatively simple way of producing nuclear fusion, the process that fuels stars and very large explosions. Decades and tens of billions of dollars had been spent on finding a way of doing this on earth in a controlled way in order to generate clean energy at minimal cost (the irony!). Fleischmann and Pons (who for brevity I’ll call F & P), claimed they could do it in a test tube with some fancy electrodes, an electric current and water. The process was called “cold fusion” and the reason you’ve probably never have heard of it is, of course, that it quickly turned out that they hadn’t discovered anything of the sort.

It’s hard to overstate the potential implications of their “discovery”. Abundant, cheap, clean energy – imagine the impact that would have had on climate change and the carbon crisis. And it didn’t take long for the notion that cold fusion might have military and strategic applications to start exercising the minds of governments across the globe. In the US, where the announcement was made (F & P conducted their experiments at the university of Utah, where Pons was chairman of the Chemistry department) the Department of Energy went into overdrive.  It ordered its labs to find out if the claims were true, diverting teams of scientists from their own projects. Weekly meetings were convened and reports sent to Washington to the Secretary for Energy. Eventually the President was briefed. This was serious stuff.

The scientific community at large was desperate for details of F & P’s experiment. At the time of their press conference they hadn’t published any of their results, although they had submitted a paper to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. The Editor understood well the potential importance of their results and fast-tracked the paper through the peer review process. However, when it was published it was relatively short, lacked detail and contained a number of errors. A paper that was submitted to Nature was withdrawn. Very quickly it began to emerge that the initial claims were wrong, the result not so much of fraud or mendacity, but sloppy science, lack of precision and over interpretation. The following year a paper was published reporting results obtained using exactly the same equipment as in the original experiment – no evidence of cold fusion was found. And there you might have though the story would have ended. Interesting to historians or science, but really just a footnote that the rest of us could forget. But then there is the money.

Money, it turns out, is involved in this story from the beginning. The University of Utah quickly had its patent lawyers on the case, and quickly devoted $5M to support cold fusion research. It also lobbied the US Government for tens of millions more dollars for the research (an effort that was unsuccessful). Industry, private equity and philanthropy got involved. By 1992 F & P were in France working with a Toyota subsidiary, an effort that eventually burned through $12M dollars and ended in 1998. Well after mainstream science had moved on, pockets of researchers in both government and private labs continued to beaver away at cold fusion (and still do). There has been no fusion success, although it’s arguable that there might have been some useful spin-offs.

The money kept flowing. Google, no less, spent another $10M on cold fusion research, between 2015 and 2019, announcing only just last week the end of its efforts  (see this commentary in Nature).  It was reported in the Financial Times that a company in North Carolina, founded by a businessman with a background in brickmaking, had attracted upwards of $100M  to develop, you’ve guessed it, cold fusion (although these days it tends to be called “low-energy nuclear reactions”).  Money came from a range of funds and groups. It’s genuinely difficult to tell the grifters from the marks, who are the dupes and who are the gamblers. Somebody appears to making a living (if not useful quantities of electricity) out of the remains of F & P’s ideas.

It turns out that real scientific revolutions are scarce. And they are often only recognised long after the revolution has occurred. Scientific revolutions that have big practical impacts on society, that lead to radical transformations in what and how we do things are even rarer, and usually come from long years of hard slog rather than eureka moments. It’s said of financial advertising that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. The same is true of scientific claims, particularly those made in press conferences. But it would appear there are gullible people out there, and some of them are minted.

Scientists are human (yes it’s true!) and like most humans we are not immune to influences from outside the lab, from journalists, university administrators, patent lawyers, governments, investors et al. The priority of journalists (for whose benefit press conferences are run), particularly those who have a poor understanding of science, is to simplify and categorise information in the best way get their efforts into news bulletins or prominent pages in the publications they write for. It’s not that they are uninterested in accuracy and precision just that it’s not at the top of their priority list. So we should withstand the temptation of the quick, easy, simple story, and wait for the boring slog of control experiments, confirmation and replication. With cold fusion that’s what happened, and quite quickly. Just not quickly enough for F & P.

While not entirely victims, I do feel a tad of sympathy for F & P. They took the heat (if you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors) that others, who were probably more deserving, escaped. They were the focus of that now infamous press conference. We all marched to the top of the hill with them, before tumbling down the other side. But they then got steamrollered. Many of us, placed under the pressure they found themselves under, might have made some of the poor choices they made. The warning of Proverbs 14:12 comes to mind.  

Frankly Franklin……

There is a (largely) unspoken rule that insists there are two topics of conversation that are inappropriate for polite after-dinner conversation – politics and religion. This is a rule I struggle with although it is not a big problem for me because I don’t get invited to many polite English dinner parties. The problem with this rule is that politics and religion are two of the more interesting topics worth having a conversation about. They are more interesting than those other staples – the weather and association football (or soccer as it is occasionally called). I suppose the rule developed because discussing religion and politics can be tricky. At the moment in the UK most political discussion begins and ends with Brexit, which shows no signs of being resolved any time soon. Its resolution certainly hasn’t been brought any closer by the election that should never have been. And there are lots of aspects of religion that are not worth discussing around a dinner table or anywhere else. But this weekend politics and religion have intersected in a way that has me bamboozled.

Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, has called a day of prayer for tomorrow (Sunday 2^nd June) in support of that other president, Donald J. Trump (President of the United States). One hand this is perfectly understandable. As he (Franklin that is) fairly points out, praying for those in authority is something that Scripture encourages every Christian to do. So I believe that I should be praying for political leaders, both in the UK (how they need it!), and others including President Trump. What’s got me confused is what Franklin is encouraging us to pray for.

On the BGEA web page with this “call”, the invitation is to pray “that God would protect, strengthen, embolden, and direct” President Trump. Protect I get. The US president is a target regardless of who he is and what his policies are. Strengthen I get – he’s an old guy and it’s a tough job. And he certainly needs direction. But embolden? This suggests that Franklin thinks Trump is doing a fine job and going in the right direction. He needs encouragement to press on with the good work he’s started. This I don’t get. Trump’s campaign back in 2016 was marked from the outset by insults and deception. It was devoid of almost any kind of virtue, let alone Christian virtue. It was fairly clear that here was going to be a President who had, at best, a distant relationship with truth, and no understanding of (or apparent need for) humility. The “Access Holywood” tape and the abuse of John McCain should, along with other things, have made him all but unelectable. And what was hinted at in the campaign has been writ large during his presidency. None of which has anything to do with me. But here’s what I really don’t understand.

US evangelicals (an admittedly elastic term) were among Trump’s staunchest supporters and it is claimed they have largely stuck by him. US evangelical leaders (or at least a prominent proportion of them) have given him public and vocal support. For someone whose lifestyle, ambitions and pronouncements are so starkly different to what Scripture teaches they should be, this support is baffling. I know that elections are about choices and the alternative was unpalatable to many evangelicals. Among other things Hillary was also perceived to have a problem with truth.  There were Congressional hearings and FBI investigations, and accusations flying thick and fast. But just on the narrow ground of telling the truth, did Hillary really have as big a problem as Trump? In any case, if they were both so equally appalling, that’s an argument for spoiling your ballot.

I understand too that a major motivation for US evangelicals was a desire to see someone in the White House who would, in time, deliver a more conservative Supreme Court. This, so the argument goes, would provide a longer term means for preventing the slide away from supposed Biblical values. To an extent this has paid off. Trump has delivered for them, wiping out the “liberal” majority on the Court (although it remains to be seen whether this will really deliver the longer term, longed for “benefits”). My problem with this is that the US Supreme Court and the US culture wars just don’t feature in Scripture. Pride, adultery, lying all do. Being aligned with the latter to achieve the former doesn’t square with any kind of Biblically-based reasoning. Even if you thought Donald was worth taking a punt on back in 2016, how can the chaos, the dissembling, the continuing ad-hominem attacks, the coarsening of debate, the sheer incompetence, not prompt a rethink?

But Franklin does not appear to be concerned by any of this. He is not suggesting that his constituency prays for Donald’s repentance or his humbling. Neither is he asking for prayer that the political process as a whole might function better to deliver real benefits to the people. Instead, he talks about Trump’s enemies trying to destroy him. Now if by destroy we’re talking about violent or disorderly activity to overturn a lawfully elected government, going about its lawful business (although this is being argued about in multiple US courts), then this should be prayed against and resisted. Fair enough.  But presumably the enemies Franklin has in mind are Trumps political opponents. And all they seem to be doing at the moment is trying, by constitutional and lawful means, to get to the bottom of who Trump really is and what he’s been up to. Of course politics can be a dirty business. Ironically Trump was elected in part to “drain the swamp”. How has that turned out? Michael “lock her up” Flynn a convicted felon, 34 indictments or guilty pleas emerging from the now-complete Muller investigation (so much for it being a hoax), multiple administration members caught out in financial and ethics violations. Despite the desire to lock up Hillary, after investigations, reported referrals and Fox News wishful thinking, there’s been little in the way of indictments let alone convictions.

Perhaps the enemies Franklin has in mind are those who lurk in the US media who refuse to give the President a fair shake. This too is difficult to understand given the way Trump and his associates have sought to systematically malign and undermine all but the most supportive media. And the White House media operation, headed a press secretary who should know better, has consistently demonstrated the same problems with truth as their boss, as most recently highlighted in the Muller report. So what about praying for honest reporting (on all sides) and rigorous fact checking so there might be something akin informed debate based on reasonably well established and agreed facts (if such a thing is possible)?

Frankly, Franklin, you’re calling on Christians to do something most us are doing anyway (and more fervently than we have for a while given the state of politics on both sides of the Atlantic). It’s the terms of your “call” that has me confused. You seem to be taking a partisan position. I’m not arguing that Christians should not be involved in politics, although as Tim Farron’s experience recently demonstrated it’s difficult. There are lots of issues where there is plenty of scope for Christians to take different positions, many of which are political. On this side of the pond you’ll find Christians (in the Biblical as opposed to cultural sense) in different political parties arguing for mutually contradictory policies. But there’s something about Trump that is beyond politics. Given the monumental deceit, lies, attacks, misogyny, racism and dangerous incompetence at home (“healthcare – who knew it was so hard?”) and abroad (“I have a great relationship with Chairman Kim”) it’s not Donald Trump enemies that are the problem. We should pray for the man. But frankly, Franklin, you need to rethink what it is exactly we should be praying.

The election that never should have been

I’ve just been to vote. That isn’t a strange occurrence in a Western democracy of course (notwithstanding frequently appalling turnout figures).  But this was an election I should never have had the opportunity to participate in. Over the next few days, all over the European Union, about 400 million people will have the opportunity to vote for the EU parliament. But I took part in another vote back in 2016, and the outcome of that vote (the EU membership referendum in the UK) meant that I should no longer be a citizen of the EU and entitled to vote in its parliamentary election.

For what it’s worth, in the referendum I held my nose and voted to remain in the EU. I held my nose because there’s a lot not to like about the EU. It could be argued that it is both a corrupt and corrupting organisation. Its own auditors frequently have a problem with its accounts, and have been consistently critical of both central EU institutions and member states. EU civil servants and MEPs seem to be on a gravy train that is opaque to public scrutiny and immune to criticism. And an insulated, self perpetuating elite seem to perpetually benefit, while all over the continent all sorts of people struggle to obtain life’s necessities. It is great at coming up with rules big and small, but equally capable of bending or breaking them when it suits. Although it should be all for one and one for all, the big states often seem to bully the small states, the North exploits the South, the East bridles under the strictures of the West, the French want to be in charge, and Luxembourg is. I get all this. 

But, many of these criticisms can be levelled at the bureaucracies and politicians in the member states as well. And on the other side of the ledger the EU has provided a forum for wide European debate about pressing issues that is far superior to the way we used to settle arguments in this part of the world. Many of these issues, like climate change or migration, or Trump or China, are much better handled by Europe acting in concert. The EU has brought real economic, educational and social benefits to many European states which might have been much the weaker without them (with consequences for us in the UK). It has brought direct economic and social benefits to the UK, sometimes in the teeth of UK Government resentment and opposition (just look at Glasgow’s experience during the 1980’s). By and large we’ve consistently punched above our weight within EU institutions, and at least in financial terms have got more out than we put in – particularly in science, technology and education. The UK pushed for the single market and radical expansion of the EEC which became the EU, having a major influence on the direction it took to get to where it is today. Finally, at the time of the referendum what weighed heaviest with me were the economic consequences of withdrawal. I confess the importance of the common external tariff passed me by, but I heard and understood the warnings about the consequences of being cut off from membership of the EU single market. I always reckoned the land border on the island of Ireland would be a problem. So I voted to remain.

And I was on the losing side.

I wasn’t on the losing side because all those who voted leave were stupid or lazy. I wasn’t on the losing side because a majority of my fellow citizens were seriously misled. I was on the losing side because for a whole complex of reasons,  that it is pointless now to psychoanalyse,  more people voted to leave than remain – simple as. And now we all have to live with the consequences. I think a lot of them will be bad consequences. But what kind of democracy do we have if some small group gets to decide when we have to be protected from ourselves?

We have a representative democracy where these issues should have been settled in our representative institutions, primarily in the House of Commons. The issues are complex, and needed to be debated and thought through in a way that was never going to happen in a binary referendum campaign. But the political class, whether because of lack of courage, or sense, or just political morality, bottled it, and abrogated their responsibility. They gave us a binary choice, and we chose. I might not like the choice, but that’s life, and that’s democracy. Or at least it should have been.

For complex reasons, the politicians then compounded their folly by conniving to subvert the choice made in the referendum. There’s not really much to choose between the hard brexiteers and the remoaners, and all the other splinter groups that have emerged. Giving us another choice will not atone for their guilt. In fact, we did have a subsequent choice in a general election, when by an overwhelming majority people did not vote for those saying the referendum result should be ignored. That choice was an option on the ballot, and very few opted for it. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and it’s genuinely difficult to see any way forward, let alone one which is attractive. So we’re stuck. And because we’re stuck in the EU, I had to go and vote this evening.

It wasn’t difficult, and it wasn’t dangerous. I didn’t have to join a long queue in baking heat and wait for hours. I don’t have any doubt that my vote will be counted (although whether it counts is another matter). Things were well organised, free and fair. It was a warm spring evening, and the staff at the polling station were polite and quietly competent as they went about their business. These are all things to be grateful for. I’m glad that once again I got to do it. But I really shouldn’t have had to.

Keswick IV Downs and ups with Micah

It's been a down and up week with Micah, although an up and down week at the Keswick convention. Let me explain the last, first. Approaching any big occasion one's been looking forward to for a while, there's naturally all the anticipation of what's to come. It's not just Keswick. The US Society for Neuroscience meeting is in November. Abstracts were initially submitted in May! All that time looking forward means that by the time I pitch up in San Diego I'll have a real appetite for the smorgasbord of Neuroscience that will greet me. Mind you after five days of posters, talks and symposia, I'll probably be ready to expire.  Towards the end of the convention of course, there’s that feeling that what was being anticipated, is now past. And it’s on to the next thing. Another observation:  in spite of what will be an intense and stimulating few days, I will be intriguingly unchanged. That’s hardly a surprise. It’s not really the function of science to change lives in fundamental ways. That’s the point I was making at the beginning of the week in Keswick I.

To some extent there’s been the same sort of process with Keswick. A long period of anticipation, and then the convention week is over. Even if it was good as anticipated (and for me it was better), there’s the obvious down as the week comes to a conclusion. But the nature of the content means that there’s something else going on too. Because this was also about life and how it’s meant to be lived.

Some of what Micah’s had to say has been pretty grim, and that continued in the final session this morning.  We heard about the total breakdown of a society that for generations had turned its back on God.  Violence and corruption commonplace, and a total breakdown of trust; trust in leaders, trust in religion, even trust within families. It didn’t happened overnight of course, it evolved and emerged over centruries. But it happened. And the only thing left was to wait for the judgement that would come. Not that it was expected. In fact it was denied. Things were the way they had always been weren’t they? All these blood-curdling warnings of prophet after prophet, and what had happened? Nothing. So much for the judgement of God. Micah didn’t live to see the fulfilment of his prophecy. But he knew where to place his confidence, and, as hard as it was, he knew he had to wait. This was all a bit of a down.

In a way we’re still waiting of course. We can look back to some of the events that Micah looked forward to, primarily what God did in His Son, Jesus. But with Micah we continue to look forward to a final vindication that Micah talks about at the very end of his book; this was the up. Micah would wait for his God. But can God be relied upon? Here we have some advantages over Micah. God’s got a good track record of keeping promises.  Bible history maps out promises of judgement – kept; promises of restoration – kept;  the promise of His ultimate answer to human sin and rebellion - kept. There promises that are still to be kept. Some will argue all this is a nonsense. But they have a track record too. Because they taunt the believer, as they did in Micah’s day and throughout history, with things like  “where is your God”?  We were reminded that Peter tells hard-pressed Christians in his day that the same taunt will mark the “last days”. So much for judgement. Things are just fine, and we don’t need your God. Peter makes the point that they misconstrue patience as slowness or absence. Actually what God is providing is an opportunity for those who don’t believe to change their ways before it’s too late. Yet more evidence of God’s grace and patience. So we ended the Bible readings on a definite up.

So things to think about.  Circumstances in “Christian” Europe may be grim, and they may get grimmer. The kind of elite corruption Micah talks about, is currently a fixture on the popular agenda. The tax-dodging of corporations and oligarchs are complained and campaigned about . Concerns about self-serving political elites lead to popular discontent if not outrage. But this drives popular discontent that manifests itself in responses that potentially make things worse (Brexit and Trump?). Intellectual and religious corruption mean that some of the mechanisms that might have led to corrections in the past no longer seem to operate. Indeed they make their contribution to the downward spiral. And in all of this God and His truth are marginalised, if considered at all. Are we in a downward death-spiral, or can the trajectory be changed? More importantly in a way, what does the remnant, that dwindling band of believers, do in such circumstances?

We do what Micah did. We wait.

Keswick III An apology to Micah

It turns out that Keswick has been a brilliant place to sit out the heatwave currently afflicting the UK. Today is the only day it's been really hot here, and it's probably nearer 25° as opposed to the 35° being experienced "down south". We've been enjoying our riverside walks to the tent in Skiddaw St where the Bible readings on Micah have been taking place. We're not quite done yet; there's one more to go. But I feel I owe Micah an apology.

I've never viewed the Old Testament as an irrelevance, as just the prelude to the interesting bit. There are lots of reasons for this, but here's one. At the end of his Gospel Luke records an encounter between Jesus and two of his former followers. That's how they would have though of themselves I suppose, because they though Jesus was dead. And they were probably fairly fearful they might be next. Jesus, who initially is unrecognised by them, walks alongside them as they head away from Jerusalem. They're pretty depressed, and probably grieving. After all, their leader and mentor has just been executed. As they new well, the Romans knew a thing or two about executions and dead men stay dead. Hence their general state of depression. The problem was that Jesus was no failed insurrectionist, or teacher of novel ideas swept away by accident or miscalculation. And the evidence? The resurrection of course. 

One of the intriguing things about this whole incident in Luke 24 is that the two disciples actually knew the key facts about the resurrection. They'd been told that the tomb where Jesus' body had been left was empty. They'd even heard that some of their number had been told that Jesus was alive. But of course, all of their experience told them this could not be true. He was dead. So they had headed off down the road, disconsolate. But Jesus of course wasn't dead. And as He walks with them he does something very interesting. It's also interesting what He doesn't do. He doesn't show them his wounds (as He did with Thomas) to identify Himself. Nor does he do a miracle to impress them. Instead, He conducts a Bible study, concentrating on all those bits of the Bible I find obscure and difficult to understand: the Old Testament, including the law and the prophets. For all I know he even did a quick tour of Micah. The point He was making was that it all spoke about Him. His approach, exposing people to the Old testament Scriptures as a way of encountering Him, proved to be a lesson that really stuck with the early disciples. When Peter gets the chance to talk to a vast crowd a short time later, what does he do? He preaches from an obscure corner of the Old Testament, the prophecy of Joel. I have to confess, given the opportunity to address a vast crowd about who Jesus is and what He's done, I probably wouldn't have done the same. But I might now be tempted to turn to Micah.

It's been amazing (except it's not really) how bang up to date and relevant Micah is.We've had the abusive elites in Micah 3, exploiting those weaker than themselves just because they can. This leads to what Chris Wright rightly called a kind of "social cannibalism" that consumes the consumer. Are we not concerned about elites in our day? Mind you, that doesn't get the rest of us off the hook. Perhaps we get the leaders we deserve by not thinking critically about so many of the little choices we make every day. Of course, Micah was largely ignored in his own day. Everything was basically fine wasn't it? Religious leaders were able to claim with apparent impunity that God was fine with what was going on. Except He wasn't, and judgement was coming. The creeping injustice, the toleration for what was wrong being called right, the religious syncretism that sought to keep the Living God in His place, in His box, and out of the public sphere. It wasn't doing in any damage was it? Things just kept going. And for those with a continuing pang of conscience, there was always temple, always religion, always more ritual.   

Except as Micah points out, God had shown what He was looking for. It wasn't more and more sacrifices. It wasn't even ultimate sacrifices. In a startling pointer to Jesus' future mission (and Micah prophesied the site of His birth), Micah says God doesn't want the sacrifice of their fistborn(s). Why? Because it was going to take the sacrifice of God's firstborn to clear the debt we have all incurred. But in general God had been consistent and clear in what He requires. As Micah 6:8 makes pithily clear (and as Jimmy Carter quoted in his presidential inaugural address) God requires us: "..to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God."  This was no radical departure, this is the whole teaching of the Old Testament. The rituals and sacrifices had their place, but it was limited. And they provided no answer for habitual, continuing, rebellion against God. Of course few were listening in Micah's day. Few may be listening today. Shortly after Micah, it all came crashing about the heads of leaders and people. They had persisted in going their own way. 

There it is in Micah. A warning to me, to us. It was there all the time. The bad, the good, the ugly and the best. 

Sorry I wasn't listening Micah.