Mourning Christianity (or at least its decline)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keswick 2023.3 Constitutionally speaking…

There is one subject that all Brits constantly bang on about - weather. That’s because we have a lot of it, mainly in the form of rain (for which we have about eighty different words and euphemisms). But there’s something else that we pretend neither to have or like to talk about that actually takes up quite a lot of our time – the constitution. By this I mean the largely political issue of how we organise ourselves. We do of have a constitution, it’s just that (unlike the US or France) it is substantially unwritten. It becomes more obvious with the occurrence of certain events. The Scottish independence and Brexit referendums were obviously about “it”: one changing it, the other not. Another aspect of the constitution was on full display in the events surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession and coronation of King Charles III (we do this kind of thing rather well). But just as the state (i.e. us collectively) has a constitution, even although it is difficult to pin down in all its details, so too does each human being (and it is just as difficult to pin down). But “pin down” is exactly the task Matthew Mason has undertaken in his Keswick seminars.

Just like the British constitution, our constitution as human beings is well trodden ground. Although neither Aristotle nor Plato had any interest in the British constitution (although both wrote about and within the political structures of their day), they were both quite interested in what constitutes a human being and human life, and what makes for a good life. They both put in an appearance seminar two (Tuesday). But a better starting point is what God has to say. So we spent a fair bit of time back in Genesis 1 and 2 (as we did on Monday). Obviously human beings are partly material, in that God makes us from dust. This is a materiality we share with other kinds of things, particularly animals. What the creation account makes explicit is that there is something else that is true of us. We have the breathe (in some sense the spirit) of God breathed into us. Is it this in combination with our material stuff that makes us human? No, because animals also have the breath of God in them too (Gen 6:15, 22). But there are two ways in which humanity is differentiated from other forms of life: our form of life, and the way God relates to us (and we to each other).

I’ve long been worried about the tendency to define humanity in terms of some attribute that we possess. No matter which attribute you pick, sooner or later some example from the animal world is found that possesses that same attribute. Language used to be a favourite. But it turns out that a number of species (including some fairly “simple” ones) can process arbitrary symbols using grammar and syntax in a way that looks suspiciously like language. And then there’s the interpretation of experiments with other primates, where they were taught sign language. Within limits, they seemed able to use this to communicate both with humans and with others of their own kind. This work had been subjected to sustained critique, but it looks as though even language isn’t that unique. Nor are other favourites like tool-use, self-awareness and so on. It can be difficult to prove these exist in other species but it is not impossible. On the flip side there are those members of humanity who might be thought not to possess some particular attribute (like the unborn child, the profoundly disabled teenager or the demented elderly person). And yet there really is there is no difficulty in identifying them as human. And this appears to boil down to their form; a combination of shape, look, capacity and attribute. But there is something else.

While God appears to talk at other species, He talks to and with humans. And from them (specifically Adam in Gen 2:23) He elicits a response. We stand in a particular, communicative relationship with Him that turns out to be important. It is a relationship that confers both privileges and responsibilities. There is the privilege of dominion over the other things that are created. Whatever that means (and its meaning is highly contested) this is a privilege and accompanying it is a sense of authority (seen, in part, in Adam’s naming of the animals). But there are also obligations; the obligation to work in the first instance, and also the obligation to obey a single explicit and easily obeyed command.

This, of course, sets up the framework for understanding a far darker aspect of our constitution that rather more depressingly was dealt with in Thursday’s seminar. Things are not as they should be, because we are not as we should be. And it’s not just that we think and do wrong stuff, it is that in a fundamental sense our stuff, what we are, has become wrong. And the wrongness is now intrinsic to what I am and what we are. It is so intrinsic that I naturally recoil from and rebel against the whole concept of original sin. I may rail against the idea that if I had never actually done something wrong, done something that contravened God’s standards, I would still stand at the bar of His justice and rightly be condemned. But that is the way the universe it. Because when Adam fell, I fell; when Adam sinned I sinned. For all sorts of reasons this doesn’t seem just. But I’m hoping that this devastating news will be followed in the final series in the seminar by consideration of what is good news. If it is the case that I can be condemned because I am inextricably linked with Adam, who acts as my representative, the head of the race to which I belong constitutionally, then maybe if I can find a new representative, a new head. And if my “registration” (or link, or allegiance, or identity) can be transferred, then it could be I’ll off the hook as far as God is concerned. Of course that new rep would have to be fundamentally different to me. Indeed they would need to have a different origin to me, otherwise they would have the same problem I have (Linkage with Adam, sin and failure). But then if they are completely different to me, if they are a completely different order of being entirely (like God is for instance), then how could any effective link to accomplished? There would just be too big a gap between us. And why would they want to be linked to me and all who like me (i.e. you and everyone else) who stand justly condemned by the Creator?

Tricky. I seem to be stuck. To quote Paul “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” I’m glad there’s a seminar left. This, of course, sets up the framework for understanding a far darker aspect of our constitution that depressingly was also dealt with in Thursday’s seminar. Things are not as they should be, because we are not as we should be. And it’s not just that we think and do wrong stuff, it is that in a fundamental sense our stuff, what we are, has become wrong. And the wrongness is now intrinsic to what I am and what we are. It is so intrinsic that I naturally recoil from and rebel against the whole concept of original sin. I may rail against the idea that if I had never actually done something wrong, done something that contravened God’s standards, I would still stand at the bar of His justice and rightly be condemned. But that is the way the universe it. Because when Adam fell, I fell; when Adam sinned I sinned. For all sorts of reasons this doesn’t seem just. But I’m hoping that this devastating news will be followed in the final seminar in this series by a consideration of some good news. If it is the case that I can be condemned because I am inextricably linked with Adam, who acts as my representative, the head of the race to which I constitutionally belong, then maybe I can find a new representative, a new head. And if my “registration” (or link, or allegiance, or identity) can be transferred, then it could be that I’ll be delivered from this depressing and devastating position I occupy as far as God is concerned. Of course that new "rep" would have to be fundamentally different compared to me. Indeed they would need to have a completely different origin to me, otherwise they would have the same problem I have (linkage with Adam, sin and failure etc). But then if they are completely different to me, if they are a completely different order of being entirely (like God is for instance), then how could any effective link be accomplished? There would just be too big a gap between us. They would be unable to identify in any way with me. And, there were such a person, why would they ever want to be linked in any way to me and all who like me (i.e. you and everyone else) stand justly condemned by the Creator?

Constitutional questions always seem to be tricky. I seem to be stuck. To quote Paul “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” I’m glad there’s a seminar left. 

Keswick 2023.2 That Monday morning feeling……

Monday dawned and the rain (largely) stayed away. At least for long enough for me to walk down through Keswick Main St, past the end of Stanger St (where a bunch of us stayed in the early 80’s), past the Crosthwaite Parish Room (where 10ofThose have their second-hand book sale) and round the corner, on to the not-quite-so-new Convention site. I was heading to the “Pencil Factory”, the permanent bit of the site, for Matthew Mason's (see his details on London Seminary's staff list) seminar series: “On Being Creatures”. I confess I have given (as well as attended) Monday morning seminars, and not always with unalloyed joy. But this I was looking forward to. There’s always that anticipation at the beginning of any big convention or series. This morning what was being anticipated turned out not to be a disappointment.

If you wanted to label the subject matter, and wanted to be pretentious about it, you’d call it metaphysical and theological anthropology. Matthew left off the anthropology and started with a significantly better (and for our purposes more useful) theological topic. He started with God. As he fairly pointed out, if we get God wrong, then not much of anything useful will follow. And of course this meant he started where Scripture starts, with God, in the beginning. Although, as he also pointed out, there is more than a hint of what came before the beginning – ie God Himself, who has no beginning. And from the outset it is therefore clear (both in Scripture and in this seminar series) that with God we are not just talking about a bigger, stronger, longer-lived, cleverer version of ourselves. This is what all of our “gods-in-our-own” image (idols) inevitably are, that is why they are so seductively comforting rather than challenging. But this is to get things exactly back to front, and another reason why to understand ourselves, we need to start with God as He is. He is a completely different order of being, and if we get this wrong there’s little chance we’ll get back on track.

In His being He is immeasurably different to us, and the same is true of His doing. And a dramatic demonstration of this is what He did when He created. Human beings are of course a creative bunch. We can create pictures, sculpture, recipes, poetry, words (frebunctiousness – has that ever been written before?) and of course chaos. But all of this creative activity shares the same property. There was stuff before the human creative step to which, when we’re being really creative, we add something genuinely new. But we don’t (and indeed can’t) create something out of nothing. And yet, that is exactly what God has done. And here there is a dramatic difference between God and the idols that we occasionally allow to usurp His rightful position. Not only can they not create from nothing, they themselves are never created from nothing; they are always created (by us) out of pre-existing stuff (wood, stone, heavenly objects, football teams, Tik-Tok performers). As Matthew hinted, Christians may disagree about how God created, but not that He created from nothing everything that there is.

And in one of his most telling comments, he also reminded us all that this means God is central to everything and its continued existence. Indeed we probably don’t think about God as sustainer enough. Wherever you happen to be right now, right there and then God is acting to sustain you and all that you can see. But what happens if we attempt to leave God out of the account? Practically, humanity has been doing this since shortly after then events recorded in Genesis 3. Intellectually (at least in our corner of the universe) there’s been a determined effort to claim that we can leave God out of the account, and then do actually attempt to do it, since the “enlightenment”. Matthew quoted Kant on human autonomy. Kant made autonomy part of the foundation for human dignity. Well it turns out that leaving God out of the equation is tantamount to trying to undo what He has done, to 'decreate'  humanity and everything else. Things just don’t work without Him. In part this is what we see around us in the culture. Without God as foundation and centre, things are inevitably confused. It has taken a while, but it is perhaps in our day that is becoming drastically clear. We live in a culture that has difficulty deciding when (and which) human life should be defended and even defining what a woman is. There’s no evidence that the culture will be able to think its way to a better place while it continues to sideline the One who made everything and continues to sustain it in the teeth of denials of His existence. And as we are seeing, this is not mere abstract, angels on the head of a pin stuff. Very quickly this issue of God’s centrality and His importance for human dignity begins to impact on vital, practical, issues like the beginnings and endings of life and much else in between.

Not bad for a kick-off, with parts II to IV to come. Hopefully Tuesday morning’s feeling will be just as good as Monday’s turned out to be.

Keswick 2023.1 I’m probably beginning to repeat myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disciplinary matters…..

I have written previously about my switching disciplines at a relatively late stage of life, swapping my scientific laboratory for a desk in my study and theological tomes ancient and modern. For me it has been largely without frustration for a number of reasons. First of all I suppose that this is because I am under little pressure related to my studies in theology. I am not doing it as a prelude to anything in particular. And despite the fact that people keep asking what comes next, I have no difficulty in replying that I don’t have a clue. In a sense (at least in the sense that is normally meant) I’m not doing it for anything. Secondly, I thought for a while about where I should study and with whom. These days it is relatively easy to study as a distance student at any number of prestigious institutions, so I had the pick of a range running from well-known University departments to various seminaries and Bible Colleges.

The academic snob in me saw the attraction of a masters from one of the more established seats of learning, perhaps one of the universities that I had previously inhabited. But theology transformed into something called “religious studies” in many such places a long time ago. My settled starting point for theology is that God has revealed Himself in a number of ways, but primarily in the person of His Son, and in the form of His word the Bible. For any theology nerds still reading, this will sound ridiculously out of date. But because these days we all claim to believe in tolerance, this might be accepted as a position to be established and defended (although largely assumed to be indefensible), that is accepted as a possible destination but not as a starting point. So, had I studied in most University theology or religious studies departments I was anticipating a frustrating period of defending the (apparently) indefensible, while perhaps learning a theological language that appeared not to say much about anything and little of any wider value. One might stumble into the realms of the sociology or psychology of religion, both useful in their own way in understanding today’s world, but neither actual theology. On reflection this did not seem to me to be an attractive prospect. Hence I chose Union, where we were at least starting from the same basis (or bias), and then doing Christian theology (the word has to be qualified these days to be meaningful).

The centre of my studies has been Scripture. Indeed technically I am doing an MTh in “Scripture and Theology”. While for most of the last two millennia this would have seemed like an entirely sensible combination, in many a theology faculty in our major universities it would be regarded as anachronistic. The Bible is just one human document of interest among many others to those of a religious disposition. Like those others it is a mixed bag. Occasional bursts of inspiring language and intriguing aphorisms, lots of mythology, and claims that today are neither true nor believable. Much of this is assumed to have been firmly established thanks to the diligent work of dedicated scholars stretching back perhaps as far as the 18^th century. Except that a sceptical frame of mind (always a good idea in my view) quickly became a philosophical campaign with its own blind spots and prejudices. Some of the “findings” and claims of the 18^th and 19^th century Biblical critics (and some of their more recent incarnations) turned out to be built on shaky historical and textual foundations. But such an edifice had been erected that there was no interest in dismantling it and finding other approaches (or even reverting older ones). Academic theology that became committed to a critical (in the wrong sense) view of Scripture fairly quickly found its ways into pulpits with predictable results; a mutilated Gospel, empty churches and a community in a crisis of multiple confusions.

This rather negative view of academic theology is neither original or peculiar to me. There has long been those both in theology and the Church that viewed the critical view of Scripture as misconceived as well as being based on shaky intellectual foundations, and there has long been opposition to it. Some of the opposition came from within theology and the Church, but occasionally some came from other Christian academics. I recently came across “A Lawyer Among the Theologians”, written by Sir Norman Anderson, and published in 1973. Anderson was one of those key post-war evangelicals who was of the first rank academically and intellectually. He was a name fairly well known to students of my generation. In this particular book he looked at the theology of the 60’s and 70’s from the point of view of one who was trained (as a lawyer) to analyse evidence and arguments. As far as I can judge he tried to be fair to the theology he discussed as it applied to the Jesus of history, the resurrection, the atonement and some of the writings of Bishop John Robinson (Anderson himself was also an Anglican who would go on to be the first chairman of the C of E House of Laity). At the end of the book he writes:

I must confess, that as an academic from another discipline—together, I believe, with a lot of other people who are neither theologians nor ministers of religion—I am becoming increasingly tired of the attitude of mind betrayed by many members of theological faculties and occupants of pulpits. It seems to me of very questionable propriety (I nearly said honesty) for them to cite New Testament texts freely when these texts accord with their own views, but ignore (or even evade) them when they do not; to quote passages from the Bible freely, but give them a meaning and application which I very much doubt if any court of law would regard as what their authors meant or intended; and to make dogmatic assertions about what can, and what cannot, be accepted as authentic or historical without any adequate evidence for these statements. As I said at the beginning of this book, members of theological faculties seem to me to indulge in more mutual contradictions, and more categorical statements about matters which are still wide open to debate, than any other academics. They are, of course, fully entitled to their opinions; but I do wish they would distinguish between theory and fact, and treat their evidence in a fair and responsible way. (Anderson, A Lawyer Among the Theologians, p229)

A long quotation, but it is salutary (at least to me) that this was written fifty years ago. I feel his pain. As another “academic from another discipline” (somewhat further removed from theology compared to Anderson) I confess that, in some of what I have been reading, and in some statements of certain clerics, I have noticed and been equally annoyed at some of the same traits. I hope that in my new studies the worst I could be accused of is treating my evidence in a fair and responsible way. 

I, Robot (but it’s really me, not robot)

Channelling my inner corporal Jones, I feel it necessary to shout a resounding “Don’t panic!” in response to recent headlines on the front pages of formally well-respected “newspapers”. For example consider this one which appeared in the Times on 31/5/23: “AI Pioneers fear extinction”. What was in view was not their extinction at all but ours as the sub-headline made clear: “Our creations are as great a threat to humanity as nuclear war or pandemics, say hundred of experts in call to regulate tech”. This was followed by another front-page story on 6^th June “Two years to save the world, says AI adviser”. The AI adviser in question was Matt Clifford, and the person he advises is the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. Mind you, all was not what it seemed. Mr Clifford felt it necessary to take to twitter to make clear that the headline did not reflect his view, and was not a fair summary of the interview he had given (you can find the details in this twitter thread). What has prompted many of these stories (besides the desire of politicians in various jurisdictions to deflect attention from other current difficulties) is the bursting into public consciousness of “generative AI” systems like “ChatGPT” and “Bard”.

First of all it’s just worth taking a breath and being clear what we are discussing. “AI” sounds like a thing, and in the minds of some it has taken on the characteristics of a malevolent personality. But, at least in the form of these “large language models” (LLMs, the family to which ChatGPT and Bard belong) this is far from the truth. Basically were are talking about large machine learning systems which work as pattern recognizers. Using a supercomputer (i.e. a very big and very expensive computer), software is designed which can be “trained” on vast amounts of data (digitised books, information from the internet, and other inputs) to attach statistics to patterns of output given specific inputs. Many of the techniques involved are not particularly new, although machine learning has been developing rapidly over the last few decades. The new factor is the vast amount of computing power which can now be deployed. Simpler systems for carrying out specific tasks have been available for a while and have been applied in areas like medical diagnosis (e.g. spotting tumours in mammograms) or security systems (detecting someone walking across a lawn in a video). But analysing language is much more complicated, requiring much more computing power to detect and define relevant patterns.

The scale of these recently developed LLM’s is huge. Think in terms of all the information on the interweb and the digitised content of several large University libraries (i.e. petabytes). This is boiled down to parameters represented in the software. In the case of ChatGPT we are talking on the order of 200 billion parameters! This complexity and the computing power that it requires allows for the production of quite sophisticated output given various language prompts. But it also creates a problem. To really exploit these systems takes a degree of skill in asking them the "right" questions; a whole new discipline of “probe design” has emerged to deal with this. There are only so many times that you can ask Bard for five jokes about John Calvin before it gets boring. But this is actually something worth doing, because it illustrates something else – you’re unlikely to get any real rib-ticklers back. Because the LLM doesn’t do funny (or knowledge, or insight). It does pattern recognition (i.e. what other words are connected with “john calvin” and/or “joke”) and information processing (which are statistically the most likely combinations of words and word arrangements that are like “jokes” encountered in training). 

You might be inclined to argue that humour is just too hard a test. Even humans have a hard time defining what is and what is not funny. And for many tasks, information processing is just fine. So, generating 5000 words on agriculture in 19^th century Bulgaria might be a more useful task (should you need to write an essay on such a topic). One can see why schools and Universities are having to think hard about whether they should routinely allow such systems to be used. But this is nothing new. The issue used to be the use of calculators in maths lessons and exams. And education is not (or should not) only be about producing buckets of information (informational  widgets). That is, after all, exactly the kind of thing that computers are good at. It should be about the development of insight and wisdom and the correct selection and application of knowledge within appropriate ethical boundaries. Although perhaps that actually requires a combination of classroom education, example, age and experience. We have always employed teachers and lecturers (worth their weight in gold in my view); we have never just sat students down next to piles of books (or iPads) even although some AI proponents think this should be one of its uses. But not just education is having to think about how to use (or not) the new generative AI systems.

The editor of the Financial Times, Roula Khalaf, in a letter published at the end of May (26/5/23) on “..generative AI and the FT”, felt it necessary to say that while generative AI “has obvious and potentially far-reaching implications for journalists and editors in the way we approach our daily work” there were problems with it. “They [AI systems] can fabricate facts..and make up references and links. If sufficiently manipulated, AI models can produce entirely false images and articles. They also replicate the existing societal perspectives, including historic biases.” This hints at issues like how LLMs are trained. Their inputs are “cleaned” and edited, they have already been shaped by someone, somewhere. But who decides what goes in and what is left out? You and I aren’t told; someone in Google or at Microsoft has decided using criteria that are not public. And how different inputs are weighted (ie what’s really important and what is less so), is also determined by others, locking in certain kinds of analysis. All of the information that might be used to train an LLM, even if not cleaned, edited or prepared in some way, already has embedded in it various biases and prejudices, including all those that fall in the collective blind-spot of our particular age. The point is not only that we are not told about these and any of the values applied or other tweaks performed to ensure that outputs are acceptable. The point is that we don't know and can't know what they are; exactly what is being "learned" in machine learning systems is not knowable by us. It is hidden by design. Khalaf continued that “FT journalism in the new AI age will continue to be reported and written by humans”; educated, experienced, mentored and quite possibly aged humans (I assume). Knowledge is more than words, and wisdom is more than knowledge. All of this is only a big problem if you spend you life looking at a screen and your only friends are sentences.

But LLMs are only one kind of AI. Perhaps there are other kinds that are more dangerous. Words matter otherwise I wouldn't be wasting my time writing this. And I should point out that it really is me, and not an AI system. Bad words and misinformation are dangerous. But compared to climate change, war, pandemics and famine, which cumulatively are already killing millions in today’s world, they are not that dangerous. If you don’t want to be constantly misinformed and outraged, go cold turkey on twitter, read books and talk to real people. Before you mention Arnie the Terminator, no AI is truly autonomous. Somebody has programmed it, prompted it, directed it. And, by and large, if you pull the plug you can stop it. It’s people who start and stoke trouble. The heart of our problems will always be the fleshy hearts of people, not silicon in whatever form. 

Heroes, pedestals and worship...

It is perhaps remarkable that, as violent as the USA is today (both literally and metaphorically), there have been relatively few political assassinations in recent times. The same cannot be said of the 1960’s, a decade in which there were three key assassinations. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and five years later his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, was killed while on the campaign trail for the presidency. But just a few months previously Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. John F had already made a global impact by the time of his election, having been a member of both the House and Senate (and publishing a Pulitzer prize-winning book) before winning the top job in 1960. His early death probably helped to preserve his reputation, despite his involving the US further in the Vietnam conflict (which would become so divisive later in the decade) and authorising a number of CIA capers in Cuba. King’s violent and tragic death, April 4^th, 1968 (he had already survived a stabbing in 1958), and his involvement in the Civil Rights movement in the US (which included the soaring rhetoric of his 1963 “I have a dream” speech) have also served to preserve his reputation. But biographers, or at least competent biographers, seek to describe their subject as completely as the evidence will allow. And in a review of a new biography of King, I was struck by the comment that “Heroes are defenceless against time’s erosion” (DeGroot’s review of “King”, by Jonathan Eig, The Times, 20/5/23).

All men, even great men, are men. Or, if you prefer a non-gendered version, all human beings are human beings. This is hardly an original or earth-shattering statement. Indeed, it is simply a restatement of what J.C. Ryle, first Bishop of Liverpool, observed back in the mid-19th century: “The best of men are only men at their very best”. In his “Expository thoughts on the Gospels” he was discussing the tendency to put prominent people on something of a pedestal, and perhaps by implication to “worship” them. Certainly to pay closer attention to them than was merited. This is not to argue that there aren’t those to whom attention should be paid, whether in science, the arts, politics or theology (or wherever your interest lie). There will be those who have technical expertise who should be listened to, whose insights should be appreciated and carefully considered. Hopefully the recent madness of despising experts because they are experts and believing the sage advice of those who have no expertise but opine anyway, has passed or at least is passing. There will be others who because of other experience will have something to contribute to a particular debate or discussion. But no-one is an expert in everything; even polymaths have blind spots and other limitations. This is why it is unwise to take too seriously the metaphysical prejudices of eminent natural scientists, who become eminent largely by knowing more about less. They are entitled to their metaphysical views (and they all have them). But their opinion should carry no more weight than those of other non-experts in metaphysics. So it is worth paying a certain amount of attention to what is being said on certain topics at a certain time over a certain range to certain people. But the topics and range will always have limits.

And this bring us to the problem of those occupying pedestals. For we tend to attribute to them an expertise that is way too broad, insight that is way more penetrating that is likely to be the case, and authority that they probably don’t want and are not capable of bearing. Eventually they will topple or be toppled leaving us with conundrums. What of their cause (if they have one)? Is that inevitably tainted by the discovery that the leader of that particular cause was flawed (although probably no more flawed than the rest of us)? King’s great cause was the end of racism, a time he anticipated when character would count for more than skin colour. That is surely a worthy, if yet unobtained, objective. This seems to be a cousin of the issue of separating an artist from his or her art. This last weekend a protester climbed on to a statue outside the BBC which was created by the sculptor Eric Gill, and attacked it with a hammer and chisel. The reason was that Gill, one of the towering figures in British sculpture in the first half of the 20^th century, was guilty of incest and child abuse. Meanwhile, on planet evangelical, yet another UK leader is currently being investigated over allegations of abuse of those under his influence, and a former Archbishop has been forced to step back from his ministry because of alleged mishandling of another abuse claim. Can you separate the man from his theology?

What has disappointed here is not speeches, sculpture or theology, but the particular human beings involved. Because it turned out (or it may turn out after investigation) that they were flawed. But then we all are. That’s why pedestals of whatever kind are dangerous. Those specimens of humanity who occupy them will almost inevitability disappoint on some level or another, at one time or another. And there is definitely a temporal aspect to this that means that the human and flawed reality will always catch up with even the greatest of human, pedestalled heroes. Which brings us back to what Ryle was actually discussing. Pedestals make for idolatry, because those who occupy them, whether by accident or design, are usurping someone who most definitely should be “up there”. It is precisely because this is how human beings are designed (to worship) that pedestals exist in the first place. But Ryle’s point was that there is someone the worship of whom is entirely appropriate. It turns out that perhaps the most examined life ever lived, examined both by His contemporaries and by many since, has yet to be found to be flawed in any respect. Ryle was discussing Matthew 17:1-13 (page 209 of the James Clark 1974 edition of his “Expository Thoughts on the Gospels”), and his focus was entirely on Jesus.

Here is someone worthy of hero worship. Because He is worthy of worship.