It’s still bright at 5pm…

One way or another I spend quite a lot of time looking out of my study window. While it does not afford a view of rolling hills, and I can only see one rather bare tree (at least for the time being), it is just after 5pm and I can see outside and don’t have to put my desk lamp on to read. All this is good news. Granted that there will be cloudy days to come when it will be duller at 5pm. But the days are now lengthening, another winter is almost behind us and that tree will not be bare for much longer. The mind turns to warmer as well as longer days and spring and summer plans; the whole mood lifts. My inner Calvinist whispers about the shorter, colder days that will follow, and a return to early darkening afternoons. But, for the moment I can enjoy the extra minutes of daylight and their promise while ignoring these darker promptings.

It is all a reminder that time is moving along. And the longer days are not the only such reminder. Just recently I’ve been at a number of funerals and thanksgiving services. One was that of a friend and exact contemporary; we had been undergraduates and PhD students in the University of Glasgow (he was much cleverer than me - his PhD was in nuclear physics). After working for a while as an engineer in the aerospace industry, he studied theology and was eventually called to be the minister of a Presbyterian church near Birmingham. Last summer we bumped into each other at the Catalyst conference in London, and although we hadn’t actually seen each other face to face for about thirty years, you would hardly have known it. Hearing about his death was a surprise on two levels. Firstly, it was unexpected. We all secretly think that only other people die even although this is patently absurd. But I no more anticipated his death than I anticipate my own (ie generally not at all). Secondly and additionally, because he was a close contemporary, the news inevitably evoked those feelings of personal mortality that lurk in the farthest reaches of the background to one’s thinking. It turns out that along with you and everyone else, as each day passes it passes for me; I am a little bit older. A further reminder of the passing of time.

Another occasion that sticks in the mind was the thanksgiving service of one of our friends in Liverpool, who had originally come to the city to study Physical Education. But during her studies she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. This meant a necessary change of direction, but did not mean despair. She went on to a successful career in business, although she had to retire on medical grounds relatively early in life. Without a word of complaint she continued to play an active role in family and church life, pouring herself into the lives of many others, including ours being an active part of one of the Church small groups we led for a while. At the service there was genuine thankfulness for a life well lived in the face of what was eventually severe disability. A life that had been of tremendous benefit to many of us and therefore a life of significance. But (and this was true of the other service too), in addition to looking back, we were collectively able to look forward. These occasions were far from solely concerned with the past.

Both of these individuals were Christians, with a firm hope that because they had placed their trust in a Saviour who had died but then been raised, they and those of their friends and family who shared their hope, could face death and know that it was not an end. In life they had known the same uncertainty of us all; we do not know the timing or manner of our death in any detail. In one case it came relatively swiftly, in the other after a protracted physical decline. But they had a security, indeed a certainty, in the midst of the uncertainty. Even death could not break the hold that their Saviour had upon them. So, facing both those known and unknown difficulties that lay ahead of them in life, they could do so with confidence. And we could meet after their deaths, with the implicit reminder of our mortal demise with a similar confidence. I don’t mean by this the sort of cocky bravado that insists on the paying of Sinatra’s “My Way” or the reciting of Henley’s “Invictus”. Both of them had sought to follow Jesus’ way because their souls had definitely been conquered by Him. And it was not with any naive and false bonhomie we sought the comfort of families who were truly grieving loss or sought it for ourselves. In the midst of the grief you would expect, there was that certain shared hope that this loss was not permanent. In time it will be trumped by a life together that is eternal. And time is passing.

In fact these occasions did more that note the passing of lives, and implicitly the passing of time. They did more than point forward to a future that was hypothetical. They evidenced that future and served as a deposit of it. Time is passing. But the future that was in view on these occasions is not merely waiting passively for us to arrive at it, it is making its way towards us. And that leads to both anticipation and a degree of restlessness. One of Rutherford’s hymns captures this. It no doubt will strike some as odd, depressing even and it can be parodied (and probably has been). It’s on my list for my funeral (which I’ll obviously be depending on others to organise) and begins with the following: 

“The sands of time are sinking;
the dawn of heaven breaks;
the summer morn I've sighed for,
the fair sweet morn awakes;
dark, dark has been the midnight,
but dayspring is at hand,
and glory, glory dwelleth
in Emmanuel's land.”

It’s well worth looking it up and reading the other verses. Being able to see out of my study window, it turns out, is just one more pointer to lighter and better days ahead.

Reading for 2025 (so far...)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stories we tell….

My reading project for 2025 is N. T. Wright’s “Christian Origins and the Question of God”. But because I managed to finish my 2024 project (Calvin’s “Institutes”) early, I decided to get started on Vol 1 of “Origins”: “The New Testament and the People of God”. Now admittedly there’s a lot of ground clearing goes on in the early chapters, but it’s useful for getting one’s bearings. And central to a lot of it is the issue of “story”. Of course the Anglo-Saxon scientist in me began to bridle at this point. But I managed not to get to the stage of chanting “just give me the facts” under my breath. Of course, had I been better educated (which is my aim in reading Wright in the first place) I would have realised that such a chant would simply be evidence of my capture by a particular story, the “modern” story. This is a story on an epic scale that still has quite a lot of us in its grip. It’s a tale about facts being true statements concerning things that exist absolutely, and phenomena that can be established in their totality using data (observations, measurement etc; for further discussion of facts, see here). We need to busy ourselves collecting such facts and once we have enough (although the threshold for “enough” is rarely explicitly stated) we can know some things for a certainty (because we’ve established the facts). Anything that doesn’t fit with this scheme (ie anything that can’t be measured and weighed, prodded and poked) probably isn’t meaningful, possibly doesn’t even exist and certainly isn’t worth bothering about. Therefore, basically only science can be trusted (because this is the sort of thing that science “does”), anything else is junk. This general view is a holdover from a particular philosophy that no longer impresses philosophers (and their fellow travellers in the humanities in general). But it holds sway in the minds of more than a few scientists I have encountered. And you’ll find it in the popular books they write (usually at or towards the end of their professional scientific careers). So more than a few non-scientists, otherwise normal and intelligent people, have made this their story. The problem is that as a story it is self-refuting. It itself is not a fact or collection of facts, it’s not science (even although it usually involves science) it cannot be measured, and therefore if true it must be false. 

Having calmed myself down, I returned to thinking about stories more widely. Wright’s contention is that “stories are important as an index of the world-view of any culture”. Which got me to thinking about the stories that are current today, those stories that might reveal the world-view of the contemporary culture. This is not a task I am capable of carrying out in any great detail. Others have spent more time and expended much more effort on projects like this. Carl Trueman and his “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” comes to mind (well worth a read, published in 2020, but by now probably obtainable second hand). What is the defining story of contemporary culture? It clearly cannot be the 18th/19th century story of humanity’s inevitable progress. The bloody 20^th century, with its world wars and atrocities, surely provided ample evidence that inevitable progress was a cruel fiction and could not be a story worth investing in. Its bankruptcy has been amply confirmed by the early disasters of the 21^st century. The story that elevates science and assumes that anything not approachable scientifically (ie most of life as we live it), while widespread, is now only held tentatively. Science itself is in a spot of bother, assailed by crises of reproducibility (what should have been one of its hallmarks turns out to be surprisingly rare) and integrity (a proportion of scientists turn out to be thoroughly untrustworthy). The results range from climate crisis denialism to falling vaccination rates with the consequential return of once banished diseases. Or maybe the more recent story that denies that there is any overarching story, and the nihilism to which this inevitably leads, is in fact the current prevailing story.

How this came to be is precisely what Trueman and others have tried to track. By his account, the efforts of a number of “story tellers” have brought us to where we are, of whom the most familiar are perhaps Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. The particular stories they originally told have themselves largely been discredited and discarded. It’s the residual, cumulative influence of their stories and their cumulative effects that are still with us. For each of these three, part of the objective was the destruction of one particular competing story. Nietzsche was perhaps the most obvious and knowing of the three as far as this aspect of the project was concerned. God might have been killed, but Christianity still had to be dealt with; it would in time “perish”. He was happy to initiate, or at least be in at the beginning of its demise. He knew (or suspected) that this would be a long-term project. In his preface to “The Dawn of the Day”, written in 1881, he writes of “a ‘subterrestrial' at work, digging, mining, undermining.” He probably didn’t realise how long it would take, in part because he was thoroughly dismissive of Christianity’s intellectual merits. After all, key Christian truths originated “in nothing but errors of reason”. He had a substitute story, and yet this story, along with those of Marx and Freud, have faired and aged arguably much worse than Christianity (and indeed other religious “stories”). The churches that these thinkers had so little time for, the centres from which the Christian story was and is (in theory at least) proclaimed, while apparently struggling in Europe and North America, appear to be doing rather well in Africa, South America and Asia. And at an estimated 100 million (estimates vary, this is by no means the highest; see here), there are more Christians in China today than in Europe. It appears that the story that Christians tell has yet to fall into the pit that Nietzsche sought to dig for it. If numbers matter, this might suggest that the story that Christians tell, of all stories, appears to be worth investigating.

But I’m not sure that these numbers do matter. What matters is the truth of the stories we tell and their ability to explain things for us; things like the past, the present and even the future. You may have noticed that we’ve been retelling part of the Christian story this week, acting it out, watching our children acting it out. Mind you, some of the versions on display may have been considerably tweaked from the original. Fortunately the original is available and can be checked, along with the larger Gospel story to which it belongs (not to mention the overall Bible story to which both belong). One can go right to the sources, rather than be suckered by caricatures. What will you find there and what world-view will it reveal? Will it be better than other stories that have been and still are told? Well, that’s a whole other story – which is rather the point.

How come you can understand this….?

One of my 2024 reading objectives was to read Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion” from cover to cover over the year. I managed it in eleven months. Obviously I was not reading it in the original 1559 Latin, nor the sixteenth century French translations. Fortunately for me it has been translated into English, and I was enjoying the fruits of Ford Lewis Battles’ labours (along with an army of Calvin scholars), originally published just over sixty years ago. The combination of Calvin and Battles has proved itself to be highly effective and in some places even entertaining. Although separated by over 500 years and a number of intellectual and cultural revolutions (and a lot else), I think I can claim to have understood more than the gist of what Calvin was on about. I’m sure that there are many allusions I missed (notwithstanding the copious footnotes), and no doubt some of the arguments he takes up have lost their force and relevance. Yet over the months it appears I was able to follow along reasonably well. And yet there are those who would have you believe that this really should not be.

We have lived through (and some may still be in) a period in which the claim has been made that communication, particularly by means of texts (which obviously lack some of the information that we have when speaking to each other), is a fairly ropey business, particularly if you want to claim that authors are routinely able to transmit the contents of their minds accurately to their readers. Additionally it has been claimed that communication of ideas is rarely what anyone actually tries to do; more usually they are trying to manipulate (dominate, oppress) you. But even this is fraught with difficulty as words on pages do not carry meaning. Meaning is to be found in interpretations inside heads. So it turns out that I can have no (or at least little) legitimate expectation that you are following what I’m writing, and therefore only a slim hope that you now understand my (admittedly sketchy) outline of postmodernist theory. One wonders in that case why I’m trying. My general persistence in such exercises (this blog now runs to 145 posts) hints at a potential problem. Any theory has to be tested against what actually happens “in the wild”. And when this theory is tested, it turns out that it doesn’t do too well.

I rather like the illustration given by Don Carson in “The Gagging of God” (p102), when he relates what happened to him when he got into conversation with a student after having delivered some hermeneutics lectures. She took him to task for being stuck in a 19^th century positivist mindset, and listed all the reasons why he should be more open to the new (ie postmodern) approach. He tried to defend his position (which it should be said was neither modernism nor positivism), but with no success. Then in a burst of what he calls “sheer intellectual perversity” he changed tack and congratulated her for using irony to demonstrate the “objectivity of truth”. She began to get rather exasperated, at which point he congratulated her further for adding emotion to irony. Close to incandescence she finally worked out what he was up to. He quietly pointed out that in practice deconstructionists (the spear-point of postmodernism and her own position) only thought that other peoples’ writing could not communicate the thought of authors in any meaningful way. The writings (and 'speakings') of the deconstructionists themselves were mysteriously exempt from any difficulty with the transmission of their meaning, which is why we were all expected to pay careful attention to them.

If communication of ideas (and other contents) were all but impossible, presumably we would have all given up trying to do it a very long time ago. And yet the opposite has been observed. Language is one of the defining features of human beings; we want to communicate, we must communicate. Once the spoken word was all that we had; we had to speak. Writing, communication of spoken work in written, symbolic, form, appears to have developed several times in history, independently in different human civilisations. In Mesopotamia and Egypt symbolic representation of information developed some time before 3000BC. Once a minority sport, with the invention of printing writing (and reading) exploded. And for all that technology is claimed to be the death of writing, who can resist a good written caption on their Tik Tok video (just so it's understood).

 It was a while after the invention of writing that  Moses, who lived around 1300BC (probably), started to record the history of a particular group of people who would come to be known as the Jews. He clearly did so believing his efforts were of some value, and, it turns out, lots of folk throughout history (if what they have said and written are to be believed) have tended to agree with him. Such communication is not perfect (no human endeavour is). What Moses wrote, and indeed whether he actually wrote it, is contested territory. As with me and Calvin, you’ll probably have to read it in translation. Some of it will seem very odd, some perhaps disturbing. But have a go at reading it. The first five books of the Bible are attributed to him. Decide for yourself whether he says nothing, or whether you can make that particular material mean anything. You’ll certainly find it considerably less obscure than Derrida.

In seeking to communicate truth, Moses was doing no more than reflecting the truth that he claimed he was writing: that he (along with the rest of us) was created in the image of God (recorded at the beginning of his writing in Genesis 1 – easy to find). God is a speaking god. He has communicated by means of the spoken word, and of course the written word. Many other words have been written (and not just by postmodernists) to explain why this can’t really be true. And yet, in the experience of many of us He continues to speak. And if written words don’t impress you, consider this. Here we are approaching another Christmas, full of the usual nonsense. But at its core is a celebration of the event that demonstrates that God is not limited to words, written or spoken. To quote some words written in the New Testament “..in these last days he has spoken to us by his (lit: in) son…” (Hebrews 1:2).

If you’ve understood anything so far, have a go at understanding that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just for tonight….

This blog is time limited. By the time you get round to reading it, it may well not be worth reading (if it ever is). I have been inspired to write it by three coinciding occurrences. The first is the noise outside my study window. It is the evening of the 5^th November, and Scousers really, really, like their fireworks. So, this time of year (and actually over several days), all the bangs, booms and whistles mean that it sounds like warfare has broken out. It hasn’t of course. Note that this is in no way to minimise the experience of those elsewhere on this continent who tonight will attempt to go to sleep knowing that what they are hearing nearby is the sound of actual war. Fortunately for us the noise is a reminder of violent times mercifully far in the past, not the sound of ongoing hostilities. There was a time when a subset of a subset of a disaffected political and religious minority attempted to blow up our Parliament. The issues were settled, or at least became less resonant, a long time ago. Now November 5^th is just an excuse to let off fireworks and build bonfires. In comparison with those former times the political issues that divide us now are relatively trivial. Politics still has its plots, but they don’t involve gunpowder and nobody dies. I for one am grateful; I’m assuming none of us would want to go back.

Meantime, on the other side of the Atlantic, US citizens (or at least a sizeable proportion of them) are carrying out that most basic of democratic obligations, to vote in an election for those who will hold power and make and unmake laws. Unusually at the moment no-one knows what the outcome will be. The opinion polls in the critical states have been statistically tied for weeks. Just like the system of elections here, US system, while imperfect, is basically sound. Everyone knows (or at least could know if they paid attention in the civics classes they have to take in school) how the system works. If someone thinks a rule has been broken, or a shortcut taken, if they think that their side has been egregiously disadvantaged, then they have one of the most active legal systems in the world where issues can be aired and examined. For every presidential election (and for many others) both major parties in the US stand up large numbers of lawyers and observers, and complaints and legal action can mean the campaign continues long after the last vote is cast. But usually the issues are settled, a winner emerges, and life moves on. That is until recently.

I have no vote in this particular election. I am an observer from afar. Like many Brits, I have a real liking for the US. But in last the few months we have seen the return of the great narcissist who has managed to appeal to a sizeable minority who feel they have no stake in the “system” as it is. Together they have constructed their own reality and sealed it off from any semblance of the “real” world. Admittedly cause and effect are difficult to discern in this context. And of course the idea that there is a real world has been hotly disputed for a considerable period of time. But a relatively new, popular form of social-media stoked nihilism has allowed one Donald J. Trump to compete for, an occasionally attain, political power. He talks to minority and “for” them. He has no liking for the “system” (“them”, “the deep state”) and claims that “it” knows this and has targetted and persecuted him. He claimed that he won last time out in 2020 but “it” stole the election from him. His supporters believed him then and do so now. When the issues were actually investigated (and there were issues) it quickly become clear that “the great steal” was a fiction. In court after court, when legitimate legal means were used to claim and highlight important irregularities, they mysteriously disappeared. He then famously use illegitimate (and potentially illegal) means to orchestrate a riot during the certification of the election result in Congress, a riot which ended up costing lives. The various constitutional mechanisms prevailed and Biden won, Trump lost. His actions around January 6^th 2021 continue to be the subject of legal action (which he will no doubt put a stop to if elected). Over the last four years he has suffered other legal setbacks including being found in a civil action to be a sexual harasser (we already knew from his own lips that he was a misogynist), and being found guilty of violating New York State campaign finance law, with other cases pending or at earlier stages. Yet by their votes his loyal supporters, who think this is all evidence of persecution, might well provide him again with the attention, position and prestige that he craves. Let us hope they only seek to do this with their votes. If again Trump loses narrowly (Biden’s win in 2020 was far from a ringing endorsement of his policies), it will not take many of his more intemperate followers, perhaps again roiled up by the type of wild accusations that are currently appearing on his social media accounts as I type, to cause real difficulty. Here in the UK we navigated a peaceful transition of power earlier in the summer (reflected on here). Our politics has by and large banished violence to the very fringes to the extent that it hardly figures at all at a national level. We can but wish the same for our US friends. In a few hours we will find out.

And just as all this was going on, one of our TV networks made the West Wing available for streaming again. I have made no secret in the past about being a fan. In Episode 3 Toby Zeigler is to be found complaining about a lack of basic decency in politics. If only he knew. The odd thing is that many of the views held by the snappy talkers in the Bartlett West Wing are actually not particularly in tune with my own. This fictional administration was probably well to the “progressive” left of my own thinking. But then they were all decent, humane and reasonably competent. And the man at the top had a moral compass that pointed in an acceptable general direction. As golden ages go, it was civilised, witty and… golden. It was fiction of course. In the real world (that again) there has never been a golden age and if we ever get to the sunlit uplands we’ll claim we’re greatly disappointed. Or at least that’s what a sizeable proportion of us will say because we’ll have found other things to moan about.

Aha! The fireworks are all but silent. Hopefully all will also be (relatively) calm on the other side of the Atlantic. Not long now.

Truth and trousers...

Spurgeon (as he makes clear) was actually quoting a popular proverb when he said in one of his sermons “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on”. Personally I prefer the version that replaces boots with trousers (it alliterates better). So pervasive and noticeable are the presence and power of lies, that essentially the same thing has been often repeated. Some trace it back to a comment by Virgil in the Aeneid (Book 4, line 174 - ‘Rumour, than whom no other evil thing is faster’, written about 25BC) , but in reality the problem of lies goes way further back than that. As recorded in Genesis 3:4, God (who cannot lie) had said X, the devil, represented by a serpent, had said Y, Eve (with tragic consequences) went with Y. Words have meaning, meaning drives behaviour, behaviour has consequences. Lies (essentially ‘wrong’ words) usually have bad consequences. But while lies are obviously nothing new, what is new (or at least newish) is their increased speed and greater range.

We need to look no further for examples than the online purveyors of conspiracy theories and other assorted lies. Alex Jones, the Infowars founder and fast-talking online host, used his platform to repeat again and again that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, in which 26 were killed (20 of them children) was a hoax. To support this assertion, he made up various supporting claims. These lies had real-world effects on those impacted by the shooting, prompting them to take him to court in civil actions. And it turns out that truth, a bit like gravity, has a way (usually) of eventually asserting itself. Jones’ claims, or more specifically the harms caused by them, were examined by two juries of his peers, one in Texas and one in Connecticut. Having calmly considered the evidence put to them in a court of law (albeit in civil rather than criminal courts), with all the rhetoric and bluster that Jones and his ilk routinely employ stripped away, both juries found Jones and his claims not to be credible and awarded substantial damages against him. It is revealing that while the Connecticut verdict was being read out in court, Jones was online mocking the jury’s decision and seeking to continue to make money from his lies (something he was particularly good at). To date, the plaintiffs in the Jones cases have yet to see much in the way of hard cash. He has sought to exploit various legal means of avoiding responsibility (or at least avoid paying out to the victims of his lies). But over a relatively short period of time his lies reached millions, compounding the distress of those who had already suffered at the hands of a madman with a gun. Sadly, his lying ways, and his use of the combination of the internet and lies to make money, both continue and have spawned (or at least emboldened) a number of imitators on this side of the Atlantic.

On the 22^nd May 2017, 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in the Manchester Arena in the UK were murdered in a terrorist bomb explosion. Many others were injured, including Martin Hibbert who was paralysed from the waist down and his daughter Eve who suffered brain damage. But Richard Hall, a former engineer and TV producer who claimed he was acting as a journalist, believed (as he told a court) that there “was no bomb” and that “no one was genuinely injured in the attack". So he took it upon himself to track down survivors, seeking to interview and video them, in a bid to show that the (true) narrative of a terrorist bombing causing loss of life and severe injury was a “lie”. He streamed and sold various DVD’s and produced a book promulgating his “theories”, seeking to monetise them. The Hibberts (again, not the state in the form of the prosecuting authorities) brought a claim of harassment against him, and last week a judge found in their favour (the full judgement is now available online here), saying among other things that Hall’s “course of conduct was a negligent, indeed reckless, abuse of media freedom”. Hall had treated the statements of witnesses, experts, authorities and indeed courts “as of no value”, and in the name of “journalism” invaded the privacy of the Hibberts causing distress. Hall was not only found to have harassed the Hibberts, but, the judge said, should have known as any ordinary person using common sense would have known, that he was distressing them. The case has yet to be settled, and it will be interesting too see what the judge considers the proper level of damages to be. But in the time that Hall’s offending videos have been available online (and his DVDs and book are still available through his website), tens of thousands (or more) have seen his material, again multiplying the distress of those already scarred by the bombing itself. The actual numbers of those engaging with Hall’s version of reality (actually an unreality) are unknowable. But the harm that he perpetrated, or at least a small proportion of it, was revealed in the legal proceedings. If this judgement is the turning point that some analysts have suggested, maybe accountability has arrived at last, and truth, rather than lies and conspiracy theories, is making a comeback. We shall see.

Of course there has always been one place to find truth, indeed the truth. The trouble is we tend to find it difficult to identify truth even when it is standing right before us. How else do we explain Pilate’s famous question “What is truth?” when it, or rather he, was standing right in front of him? It is almost as though humanity is conditioned to prefer lies. Hence Spurgeon’s contention, now amplified by modern technology.