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By ChrisW, 22 January 2010 7:20 pm

As often before, this blog really revolves around two things coming together. The first was the widely reported revelation that some US military gunsights have biblical verses coded onto them. This has provoked an utter storm of outrage and I suspect most Christians have run for cover on the matter. Personally, although I find the slightly underhand way of putting the verses on the rifles somewhat dubious I have fewer problems about them being there in the first place. Even in Britain we still have a simple prayer for blessing said over naval vessels (even nuclear armed submarines) at their launching ceremony. Now I do not wish to defend the sort of holy right-wing politics that somehow confuses the Kingdom of Heaven with an earthly state, a view much less common in the UK than in USA. Nevertheless, we really need to ask, if our warfare is legitimate, what is so wrong about invoking God’s blessing upon it? And, if our warfare is illegitimate, then surely we have more pressing problems than verses on gun sights.

This crystallised my thinking on another matter where I need to speak in veiled terms. Some years ago I was involved in chairing a venerable if battered organisation with a long and honourable track record. I expended long hours on this and achieved some degree of restoration. After a couple of years, someone  – let’s call him X – joined me on the organisation and it soon became apparent that he had ambitions to replace me as the chair. Every committee meeting was rendered difficult. He would protest that he hadn’t been consulted, that I had acted against the best wishes of the organisation or that I was simply not following correct procedure. He made temporary alliances with other members of the committee to ensure that what I wanted wasn’t approved. He vetoed sane and sensible proposals simply to undermine my authority.  The result was that I came to dread committee meetings.

Eventually some of the young people involved at a low level in the organisation came to me, closed the doors behind them and said “X wants to take your place. We don’t want it to happen and we are prepared to help you fight against him.” I considered the matter for a few seconds and then said I was not willing to fight and that I didn’t want them to battle against him either. My decision was based on both Christian and pragmatic grounds. On Christian grounds, I did not feel it right to struggle against him; I would have to have challenged him and effectively opened some form of intellectual or committee level warfare. On pragmatic grounds, he was – as far as committees went – something of a street fighter with a rare gift for the strategic amendment or the sudden adjournment and I would, I’m sure, have been outmatched. I suspect there was also too an element of weariness in my decision: I hate such things and like nothing more than universal amiability (a most dangerous weakness). And when I considered the matter, being either excessively self-critical or genuinely humble, I decided that perhaps X might do a better job than me. So when my position came up for renewal I let him replace me and take the chair of the organisation.

Years past during which the organisation effectively severed contact with me. Nevertheless, disturbing rumours reached me. This week I heard from someone close to the organisation who gave me text and verse; X was an utter disaster and all but destroyed the organisation I worked to build up. So I now wonder whether I did the right thing in edging away from confrontation. Perhaps, I did the right thing for myself. But did I do the right thing for the organisation?

As the knee-jerk response to the gunsights issue has shown, pacifism (whether literal or metaphorical) is awfully tempting and indeed is the response we Christians are expected to adopt.  But after deeper thought it seems to me that there are times and places where not only is fighting right, but not to fight is to give evil the victory. I’m sure for many of you this is a truism. But I think we need to think about it. Given that in the West Christianity is now in the middle of what we can call ‘culture wars’ against New-Age postmodernism, an aggressive if shallow secularism, and Islam, simply yielding the field may be catastrophic.  Yes, Christianity has waged battles in the past that have been wrong; yet to refuse to fight for anything is surely equally wrong. We need wisdom!

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By ChrisW, 15 January 2010 7:33 pm

Naturally enough I have had a considerable interest in the dreadful Haiti earthquake.  In Lebanon I worked and published on precisely the same type of tectonic boundary that gave us such tragic losses this week, and most of my classes cover earthquakes at some point.  Interestingly, the quality of material being pasted on Google Earth is now so good that I was able to overlay photographs of the devastation within 30 hours for my classes to look at. It is slightly unnerving (or ought to be) to look down at a wrecked building knowing that certainly the dead and possibly the living are underneath.

Anyway any unease about my use of the data pales into insignificance compared with Pat Robertson’s monumental monstrosity of a statement to the effect the Haitians are to blame for the earthquake because they made a pact with the devil long ago. As it was fortunately not extensively covered in the UK I need to repeat what he said in a radio interview:  “[S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ They kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle, on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island.”

Now Pat’s comments have been leapt on and rejected by almost everybody for all sorts of reasons. (For a start his geography and history is completely and utterly wrong.) Had he talked about the fact that apparently up to 50% of the population practice Voodoo, I might have had more sympathy. But sometimes erroneous comments can actually make you think. Let me make several observations.

1) It is always terribly tempting to try and justify God’s workings in catastrophic natural events. This is a form of what is called theodicy.  To do this has several benefits. One benefit is that you have the opportunity to do what all humans like to do, which is to find meaning in the apparently meaningless. And one reason why many of us would like to be prophets (come on now admit it!) is we would like to be those who wield the power to unlock mysteries. I’m sure we would love to hear people say ‘Thank you pastor/preacher/writer/my friend, I now understand what is going on in the Balkans/with Israel/with the money markets etc.”

2) There is no more attractive form of shedding light on a natural disaster by explaining it in terms of God’s judgement.  Something as seemingly random as an earthquake raises an obvious theological problem; why does God slay the apparently innocent? Explaining this in terms of judgement on sin is a neat trick. It doesn’t simply remove the problem of God causing pain on the guiltless; it turns a vice into a virtue by making the disaster a just judgement.

3) Another advantage of pontificating on disasters is that it subtly set you up as being privy to the mind of the Almighty. You alone have been able to eavesdrop at the door of the chamber of heaven where decisions are made.

4) I can’t help but think that Pat fell into the old trap of talking the Devil up; always a good way to get your audience’s attention. The notion of an entire nation cursed with generations of disaster as a result of a satanic pact has the makings of a wonderful novel; a heady mixture of Stephen King and dodgy theology.

5) One or two people have made the comment that Pat clearly can’t distinguish an act of God from an act of plate tectonics. This of course conveys very poor understanding of theology; there is no inherent problem for Calvinists at least, with God acting through his own mechanism of plate tectonics.

6) One of the things that puzzles me most is that this seems to represent a very Old Testament view of things. There Israel was told that failure to keep the covenant would result in natural disasters. (Mind you even in the Old Testament earthquakes can get treated as natural events without any attempt to invest them with moral or judgemental significance.) Yet I can think of no such teaching on cause-and-effect in the New Testament. The nearest I can come to it is Paul’s comment in 1 Corinthians 11 that individuals who have treated communion frivolously have died. Certainly Jewish culture in Jesus day believed in a very tightly linkage between sin and disaster.  In Luke 13:1-5 we read: ‘Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them — do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”’  Or John 9:1-4: ‘As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”’  A parallel example are famines which are mentioned frequently in the Bible but sometimes with no reference whatsoever to them being an act of judgement (for example Genesis 12:10; 26:1; Acts 11:28).

No; I’m afraid we must resort to the uncomfortable truth that on many matters God keeps his own counsel and resist the temptation to explain. We tend to consider the book of Job as being about individual suffering; but its lessons also apply to universal suffering. At times we simply do not know why these events happen and all we can do is keep our mouths closed (and our wallets open).

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By ChrisW, 8 January 2010 6:45 pm

I really do not know who reads these blogs. All sorts of people seem to dip on and off without me being aware of it. Anyway, for those who do not live in the British Isles, it’s been cold here. In fact since Christmas it’s been persistently very cold. It is eloquently summed up in the photograph below from Nasa’s Terra satellite. I added the red blob for normally mild Swansea where the cold has been almost unprecedented. Snow fell on my car on Tuesday and is still on it on Friday afternoon despite me having travelled about 30 miles in the intervening period. Many of you who live in harsher climes will no doubt snigger at we Brits throwing up our gloved hands in horror at temperatures of a mere -10^oC. Well, we just aren’t prepared for it.

A couple of observations. First there has been much discussion as to whether this demonstrates that worries about global warming are misplaced. The answer is surely a long the lines of, if one swallow does not make a summer then one cold snap does not make a new Ice Age. The larger-scale and longer term evidence still, to my mind, suggests global warming. I gather, for instance, that at the moment parts of Alaska are warmer than Florida. Nevertheless, I am somewhat uneasy about the way that meteorology seems incapable of medium-term prediction. To my knowledge no one predicted the worst cold spell for either 30 or 47 years (depending on who you talk to). In fact our hapless Meteorological Office, undaunted by the fiasco over its ‘barbecue summer’ predictions that predated one of the wettest summers on record had been predicting a warmer than usual winter. This leads to my second observation: the reminder that there are two kinds of science: hard and soft.

‘Hard science’ is wonderfully exemplified by this photograph. I am old enough (just) to remember the wonder of the grey grainy smudges of the first photographs laboriously transmitted from space, and now we have full colour high-resolution imagery bounced back to us almost instantaneously. The process by which we get these images: the launching of satellites, their injection into precise orbits, their painstaking navigation and the transmission and reception of digital imagery is a marvel that we take for granted. This is hard (and splendid) science. Yet medium to long-term weather forecasting – not to mention climatic prediction – is science of a much softer and more speculative nature. Clearly, the systems involved are so complex that is virtually impossible to precisely predict what is going to happen. Interestingly enough in geology we have both; the precise analytical and very measurable details of rocks and the speculative modelling of what really did happen 350 million years ago.

Both hard and soft versions are science; but they differ in methodology and the problem is that soft speculative science shelters under the aura of hard science. It’s worth bearing this in mind. I am a scientist and happy to be one. Nevertheless we who are scientists need to carefully distinguish between hard science where the results can be measured to within millimetres, fractions of a degree or milliseconds, and the softer more exploratory science which has more guesswork than we would like to admit. Scientists need to be wary that the unassailable facts of hard science do not lead them into the arrogance of claiming too much for speculative models of soft science. And those of you who are not in any shape or form scientists need to be aware that despite its stunning achievements not all science is quite a solid as its proponents would like us to believe. I suppose you could say that knowledge is a vast sea of uncertainty in which science has created small clusters of firm but growing islands. But a lot may yet be hiding in those unknown seas.

Have a good week and stay warm. Or, if you’re in Alaska, I hope things cool down.

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By ChrisW, 1 January 2010 8:12 pm

First of all happy New Year to you and I hope you were blessed by the Christmas season. I did a lot of college work, got some plot ideas together and read a lot.

Following through a mention on the Christianity Today review of the year I came across some much discussed blogs by Michael Spencer  on the ‘coming Evangelical collapse’.  There is a similar sort of treatment on this website as well and I gather the matter has been discussed widely elsewhere. The basic thesis of these authors is that Christianity in the United States (and it is distressing that a number of authors fail to distinguish between the United States and the rest of the world) is, for all its apparent strength, in deep trouble and a massive decline or even collapse looms in the next few decades. Now being on the other side of the Atlantic I do not feel able to make any serious comment on this thesis as it applies to the United States. Ignorance is not a good basis for opinion. However, I do think it is worthwhile pointing out the experience of Wales in the last hundred years and suggesting that anybody who is interested might find it very profitable to do a detailed sociological and theological comparison.

The basic situation is thus. One hundred years ago, buoyed by the 1904 revival (itself the last of a number of great revival events) Welsh nonconformity of an essentially evangelical hue was the dominant cultural feature of Wales. Chapels of every size and shape dominated the landscape and in any sort of urban area you would often find chapels every few hundred yards. On my five-mile drive to work I pass seven buildings that were chapels 100 years ago and I could easily adjust my route to pass nine. Welsh culture was dominated by the hymn singing and choral tradition of the Church: hymns were sung at rugby matches; they still are but no one knows what the words mean. The Welsh churches were sufficiently powerful that they were regularly consulted by administrative authorities at every level. Chapel culture dominated the moral, cultural and spiritual landscape. Deacons ruled the world.

And then slowly at first but soon at an appalling rate the tide went out. Chapel culture was still lingering on in the 70s when I came to South Wales and was converted. There were still parts of Wales where you could not buy alcohol on the Sunday, the Saturday evening paper had a full page advertisement for church services for the following day and on Sunday itself people (true, mostly by now old women) could be seen regularly filing to church from 10 o’clock onwards. Every year began in Swansea with a civic ceremony in which some chapel or other hosted civic leaders. But these were the twilight years and all these phenomena  have now gone. Indeed my own church is held to be one of the largest in Swansea (population 250,000 ) and we barely get 150 people on a Sunday morning. The percentage of people attending church regularly in Wales is now less than 3%, which means that you can put every churchgoer in Wales in the great Millennium stadium in Cardiff and still have space.

There are certainly some striking parallels between Welsh nonconformity a hundred years ago and American evangelicalism today. There was an emphasis on controlling culture and setting the moral tone, there was a glorification of big-name preachers, an encouragement of peripheral activities such as male voice choirs which, although church sponsored, were somehow not really Christian.  There was the often sycophantic wooing of politicians which was heartily reciprocated by the vote-hungry politicians themselves. There was an emphasis on music and events and on novelty and status. There were weighty rulings on such vital matters as what one wore and what one said. There were the massive building programs which saw chapels rise up like mushrooms.

Now don’t get me wrong – there were giants in those days; great missionaries, great preachers and great scholars. Yet seemingly, all that they laboured for vanished within a few decades.  Many of the bright young men were lured into liberalism or ecclesiastical showmanship; others perished in the trenches of the First World War. Many others found the heady politics of the 1920s far more attractive than churchgoing. Nevertheless the scale and speed of the collapse is extraordinary. I think I remember reading that Martyn Lloyd-Jones found himself the only evangelical minister in the sizeable urban sprawl of Port Talbot in the late 1920s.

Quite simply and I’m sorry it is such a sober thought at the start of the year, it is worth bearing in mind that even the most apparently solid church culture can collapse within decades. In one sense that’s a scary thought. On the other it’s an encouragement to put our trust not in denominations or programmes but in the living God.

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By ChrisW, 18 December 2009 6:37 pm

Almost no one has read the whole of Proust’s 7 volume epic À la Recherche du Temps Perdu but any self respecting pseud knows that the protagonist’s sudden recollection of the past which is the subject of the book is triggered by him eating a cake, a petite Madeleine. I was reminded of this the other week when I was at a carol service in an ancient chapel. As it came to its conclusion there was one of those wonderful moments when they dimmed the lights so that the only lighting came from candles (or at least the electronic facsimiles approved by Health and Safety Police) and we all sang Once in Royal David’s City. And as we did I was suddenly reminded of so many Christmases in so many different places and I was almost overwhelmed by a great tidal wave of nostalgia. Just like Proust’s Petite Madeleine in fact. And the thought came to me: isn’t this part of the wonder and joy of Christmas? The carols, readings and rituals (turkey, tree, crackers, cards) of Christmas act as a sort of similar trigger. (As an aside, I suspect the role of Christmas as nostalgia-fest becomes more and more important as you get older.)

A few moments later I came to my senses and realised that I had fallen into a trap. I do not wish to knock memories or remembering for they are indeed good things but it is the good things, not bad things, that can form the greatest peril for the Christian. We need to remind ourselves that Christmas is not – of course – fundamentally about remembering our own past, although the recollection of memories may be part of the blessing of the season.

In fact when you think about it there are any number of parasites that cling on to Christmas trying to suck the goodness out of it. There are the parasites of family, food, presents, parties and fellowship and fine music. All good things; but all in danger of smothering the Baby.

I’ve worked a little bit in jungles and there when you finish your fieldwork one of the rules is to check yourself for any ticks and leeches draining out your blood. I’m afraid spiritual equivalents of such parasites cluster around the celebration of Christmas. I am no fan of banning Christmas (on that score Cromwell was wrong), but I do believe that it too should be carefully and regularly scrutinised for blood-sucking parasites.

No, I’m afraid one of our tasks every Christmas is to make sure that our good does not get in the way of God’s best. Christmas is all about remembering God’s great intervention in Jesus without which we would have no hope. It is also a very convenient occasion to look forward to the Second Advent. In fact the writer of Once in Royal David’s City gets the tone just right for the last verse (sometimes not surprisingly omitted) which goes thus

Not in that poor lowly stable,
with the oxen standing round,
we shall see him; but in heaven,
set at God’s right hand on high;
when like stars his children crowned,
all in white shall wait around.

(And if you are fortunate whoever is leading the music or playing the organ will at this point be theologically acute enough to up the volume to forte. )

Well whoever you are and wherever you are may you have a good Christmas. The sort of Christmas that will give you good memories. But may you never mistake the memories for the reality.

Chris

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By ChrisW, 11 December 2009 6:30 pm

It was the last day of teaching today and I was delighted to be able to show a BBC documentary Hot Planet on climate change issues to my environmental studies students. The ability to project television programmes from the BBC’s excellent iPlayer in class is potentially revolutionary.  It was also a very relevant documentary. It was typical of the current fashion in documentaries: sexy presenters (male and female), dramatic imagery, continuous and often loud background music and it bounced from topic to topic so rapidly that it was hard to be bored. Boredom must be avoided at all costs! There was much about it that I thought was good and it was an excellent complement to my lectures and notes. And, as I mentioned in last week’s blog, I don’t really have much of an objection to its thesis that we face human-induced global warming on a somewhat alarming scale.

There was however something that troubled me to the point at which I think it is worth blogging on. I’ve seen it before and Hot Planet was by no means the worst offender. Quite simply it was the blurring and intercutting of computer-generated imagery (CGI) with real imagery. In places we shifted within 20 seconds from fantasy film CGI (clips from Day after Tomorrow) through digitally created computer reconstructions to true imagery from real events and all without warning. Frankly, I don’t like it.  I could tell the difference from real storm footage to Hollywood generated imagery but I’m not convinced my students could. In the past, the shift from reality to grainy and pixelated computer-created imagery was so obvious as to need no comment. Now it is much less easy to tell the difference between these, let alone the intermediate of ‘Photo-shopped Reality’. I should say, by the way, for the benefit of climate sceptics and conspiracy theorists that I was not aware of any case which materially altered the factual basis of the documentary. It was just done for effect. I have no doubt similar things occur in almost every documentary.

I don’t mind this sort of thing in the cinema, particularly in something like science fiction or historical fantasy. But I find it troubling in documentaries. Ideally, I would like some sort of icon or subtitle that states whether what we are seeing is authentic, enhanced or totally created. That is of course too much to ask given the almost universal occurrence of digitally enhanced imagery; we all tweak our holiday snaps in some way or another. To some extent distortion of imagery is as old as the camera; as the saying goes ‘the camera always lies’. Indeed, in the dim and distant days of film, you could always buy particular slide and print films that gave somewhat enhanced colours to make your holiday skies and seas bluer than they really were. But here we have gone much much further.

Now, this may seem a petty rant but here there are deep issues here on how we portray truth in a society that has given up the idea of a divine truth. I suspect that a massive distortion of the truth never arrives in a single overwhelming tsunami of falsehood; instead it creeps in quietly like the advancing tide through the successive advance of a million wavelets of little deceits.

There is an interesting side-effect of all this that merits noticing. The effect of such CGI wizardry and Photo-shop enhancement is not, in fact, a mood of universal credulity in which people believe everything they see. It is actually the very contrary; an endemic and pervasive scepticism which doubts everything. I’m not sure whether credulity or scepticism is worse. Those who doubt everything will never believe lies; but equally they will never be able to trust the truth either.

Have a good week.

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By ChrisW, 5 December 2009 9:15 am

I don’t recollect that I have really talked about global warming at any point in these blogs. There have been several reasons for my omission: I have to teach the subject (and it’s not an easy one) and other people have been talking about it so loudly that I haven’t felt the need to say anything. However we are on the verge of the Copenhagen Conference and there are some very interesting things happening which I think merit some discussion.

Right at the start let me say that I hold to what I would say is still the ‘general scientific consensus’ that a) there is some sort of rapid climate change/global warming going on, b) that is almost certainly due to our production of CO₂ from the burning of fossil fuels and that c) it is a wise and prudent thing to try to cut CO₂ emissions. In short, I am a cautious and not uncritical believer in anthropogenic climate change. (And incidentally last month was the wettest November on record in the UK, and one of the warmest too.)

Until about a week ago, I would have said that most of the attendees at the forthcoming Copenhagen conference would have held to that general scientific consensus. But something rather strange and troubling has happened. Someone downloaded many megabytes of e-mails and data from the prestigious Climatic Research Unit of University of East Anglia’s servers (as ever, see Wikipedia for details) and those perusing them have claimed to find evidence of fraud and fabrication of data to support claims of global warming. Within days, the Internet and even the newspapers have been full of allusions of conspiracy from that eclectic group that we might call climate-change deniers. The result is that, at the last minute, it may be hard to get any major decision at Copenhagen.

Let me make some comments here. First of all, I have read what are claimed to be the most revealing e-mails and frankly I am unimpressed by the claims that they demonstrate any fabrication of data. In terms of substance, I see no evidence that any significant claim of the ‘global warming is a fact’ scientists has been undermined, let alone overturned. In terms of style, what I have read sound no worse than the sort of hasty communications that go on between all scientists over publications and theories, particularly those in the hotly contested frontline areas of science. (Heaven help any of us if all our e-mails were ever published!)

Second, the timing of this piece of criminal hacking is very striking. I cannot believe it is an accident. I would love to know how it was done and who funded it. A lot of people have a lot to lose at Copenhagen: not just the big oil companies. I have a niggling suspicion that there will be some new revelation this weekend; just on the edge of the conference itself.

Thirdly, as one or two of the wiser commentators have pointed out, what is particularly striking about this series of e-mails is in fact the absence of any reference to a plot, a conspiracy or even a grand plan to spread the message of global warming to an unsuspecting world. I’m afraid the protagonists appear to be ordinary scientists more concerned with getting their papers published rather than inventing a monstrous lie that will terrify the World.

Finally, the most serious allegation has been that the climate change believers have been guilty of foisting a religious creed on a gullible world. Now here I pause. Indeed, much of the language used by the ‘global warmers’ has been religious in both tone and content. We have been asked to simply believe the men and women in white coats and invited to put our trust in the scientists. In fact, the language has been more than religious, it has been positively eschatological. We have wiId-eyed prophets of doom and their camp followers with their placards and banners. Didn’t I read somewhere that we had just ‘days to save the world?’ Actually, more than one prophet about the state of the future as a result of global warming has ransacked the book of Revelation for metaphors.

Yet what is interesting is the tone and language of the ‘climate change deniers’ is exactly the same. It is the dark counterpart of the affirmers. Here though instead we have talk of a sinister conspiracy, of fraud and manipulation of figures and the twisting of graphs. There are hints in some circles that these men and women are liberals, promulgators of dissolute lifestyles and even dark intimations that they want to undermine the very lifestyle of the Christian West. I don’t think anybody has yet identified the Antichrist among the global warming community but it cannot be long. Perhaps the newly appointed President of Europe (apparently a strong Catholic) may yet be pushed forward as a candidate. (The fact that he is from Brussels is slightly problematic: it’s hard to treat a Belgian Antichrist seriously. But perhaps that’s part of the diabolic disguise.)

Cautiously, I wonder if what is happening is that both pro and anti-climate change parties are scrambling to stand upon the high ground of the hill that Christianity once held but has now sadly vacated in the West. There is a double tragedy here: not only is the Christian voice muted, but in the ensuring silence both parties have sought to acquire the stern and solemn tone of religious truth.

I gather that it may not have been G.K. Chesterton who wrote that ‘once men cease to believe in Christianity, it is not that they believe in nothing it is that they believe in anything’. However I still think that it is true. What we are seeing is a version of this: ‘when men and women cease to believe in Christianity, they will continue to use its language to support whatever else they passionately believe in.’

Have a good week.

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By ChrisW, 27 November 2009 6:30 pm

I had an odd message on my old blog site yesterday. It simply read “用心經營的blog~您的部落格文章真棒!!”  and seemed to relate to a blog about a month ago. As I gazed perplexed at it, inspiration suddenly triumphed over commonsense and I pasted the text into Google Translate and pressed the buttons for Chinese to English. In seconds I got the following: ‘Working hard to blog ~ your blog article terrific!!’ I would give you the name of the sender but I suspect it is indeed from mainland China or (following last week’s blog) Tibet. I must admit I love the idea that illegally translated copies of Lamb among the Stars are being furtively circulated across China. Who knows? Anyway if you are reading this in China: may God bless both you and your nation!

Anyway back to the West. Our minister preached the other Sunday on spirituality and began to tease out some of the problems with this very enigmatic word. This stimulated me to think about this and I have concluded that what most modern people mean by spirituality bears very little resemblance to what older Christian authors understood by it. (Mind you, I’m not sure older writers used the word very much; I’m sure there’s a PhD thesis somewhere on the ‘Death of Religion and the Rise of Spirituality’.)  So I thought I’d pen some comments on this but I do have to say that my thoughts are very tentative.

My basic proposition is along the following lines. Modern writers when they use the word spirituality seem to be referring to the pursuit – or experience – of some mystical or extraordinary psychological experience. Older Christian writers, if they used the word spirituality or any such concept, would not have disagreed but would always have seen it as an experience in the context of religious creed and religious action. Although I suspect it’s not often been formalised, traditional Christianity has had three interlocking elements: right beliefs (orthodoxy), right practices (orthopraxy) and the mystical experience of God. (Ironically, the last element has often actually been considered the most minor one and, in some churches and individuals, almost ignored altogether.) In my view, within traditional Christianity, mystical experiences have always been constrained by right beliefs and right practices. There is a certain logic here: our internal experiences are notoriously susceptible to being affected by music, mood or what you’ve just eaten or drunk. They’re also impossible for others (or anybody?) to test for genuineness. Creeds and conduct are, in contrast, much less ambiguous. The result was that in traditional Christianity all experiences had to be tested by their  effects on what you believed what you did. A spirituality that led you to deny Christ or rob a bank wasn’t genuine. And a spirituality or spiritual experience that led you to understand the creed better or to love your neighbour more completely was more likely to be authentic. In summary, the untestable experiences of spirituality were thus constrained by the external creeds and codes of religion.

Today though I think things are very different. What we have today is, all too frequently, a spirituality that stands on its own and seeks no external authentication. The modern spirituality is a free-flying, liberated mood divorced from any concern with right beliefs and right actions. It is no wonder that so many people today claim to be spiritual without being religious.

The problem with modern spirituality is that of all internal experiences: namely, how do we know we have something of genuine value? At the risk of sounding rather unspiritual I would say that if you gave me a first-class restaurant with a fine view over beautiful countryside, I might easily have something close to a spiritual experience. Send me a Nikon D90 with the 18-200 VR (MK2) lens and the experience I will have on opening the box will, I assure you, be pretty much on the spiritual plane. Indeed I don’t have to be hypothetical: I have enjoyed near rapture on an ageing Boeing 707 at seeing Mogadishu vanish into the haze behind me. And seeing your newborn children is also awesome.

Put like that you see the problem.  A spirituality without religion is actually quite problematic. What can we say to someone for whom drink or drugs provides some sort of spiritual boost? What about those for whom shopping gives a spiritual high? And if we liberate spirituality from both creed and morality, why can’t violence or arson be spiritual?

Well, I need to think about this further. But you can understand why I’m a little cautious when I meet someone who says ‘I’m very spiritual but I don’t like religion’.

Have a good week.

Comments (9)

By ChrisW, 20 November 2009 7:02 pm

It would be very tempting to pursue the theme announced in the comments to last week’s blog that I am not simply banned in Tibet but actually threatened by Tibetans. The idea of mysterious Tibetan assassins lying in wait for me (what with? yak prods? yurt stakes?) is so wonderful that I refuse to countenance the possibility that the death threat merely comes from one of my mildly deranged students who probably thinks that Tibet is some sort of London fashion emporium.

Actually, the week actually brought fairly serious news for those of us engaged in Christian writing: namely the fact that the curious tripartite organisation that is Wesley Owen (bookshops), Authentic (books) and the United Bible Society are effectively bankrupt and are in the hands of something close to a receiver. This is sad and difficult news not simply because they owe me several hundred pounds in royalties. Nearly 500 jobs are at stake and I have a suspicion that with the state of retail and publishing in this country many of those who lose their job will not easily find other ones. Incidentally, this is part of something of a general malaise in this sector of publishing: I gather that Borders is also in a perilous state at the moment.

I have some specific comments on these matters but they are not really suitable for blogging. Let me instead say that I’m praying for some sort of solution to this problem but I feel that whoever takes over has at least three deep obstacles to deal with

Obstacle 1) Book readership has declined catastrophically in society in general and only slightly less amongst Christians. I commented to someone earlier this week that if I walked past five hundred of our students in the corridors and common rooms I would barely see one reading a book (and, in all probability, that would be a vampire book). They text, they wriggle and tap at computer games, they play cards, they access the Internet, but they very rarely read. (The fact that some of our students are of the highest calibre makes it all rather more worrying.) As so often with social trends I suspect the church is merely a few years behind. Our own church, which includes a very high number of doctorates, is not marked by high levels of reading. It would be a fascinating exercise to ask from the pulpit, how many people had bought or read a Christian book in the previous month. I’m not sure I have the courage to raise the question. Exactly why there has been this decline ought to be discussed some other day. Is the key factor the rise of experiential-based worship? Or the growth of the Internet? Or is it just the busyness of modern society? Anyone attempting to market Christian books these days has to grapple with this waning literacy. And trust me, when you get out of the habit of reading books then soon the very idea of reading a book becomes a hurdle that has to be overcome rather than a delight to wallow in. Incidentally, I should say that not all young people in churches do not read: both our sons are very literate members of theologically conservative churches that regularly proclaim the importance of reading.

Obstacle 2) Purchasing on the Internet has now become the norm rather than the exception (thanks Phil for the correction here!). To be honest it is so easy buying books on the Internet that I find myself doing it more and more frequently. Let’s say I realise that I need a book. What are the alternatives? I could get out the car, drive down to town, try and park, find a bookshop, locate the book section and then probably find that the book wasn’t there but they could get it for me in a week or so at full price. I then have to return back home. Goodbye the best part of two hours. Or I could call up Amazon, browse around, check the reviews, order online and have it delivered within little more than 48 hours at a discount price. All without leaving my seat and probably within ten minutes. It’s not a hard decision is it? I wish it was otherwise: I love bookshops but the equations don’t stack up

Obstacle 3) Digital downloads are finally beginning to make inroads against paper books. Around ten years ago someone got in touch with me trying to get digital publication rights for the two books I wrote as John Howarth, Heart of Stone and Rock of Refuge. I was assured that digital book readers were going to take off. They weren’t then but it looks like they will soon will with Kindle and its kin. In fact my most recent purchases of theological literature have been in digital format. I have recently moved to the new Logos Bible Software 4 (very nice) which seems to be the winner in the battle for Bible study and research software, and bought some books for that. No, I don’t like reading on screen but I do like to be able to painlessly reference and search books like this. But I can’t help but feel that, as digital downloads have largely squeezed record shops out of existence, so downloads may do just the same for bookshops.

So with these three big obstacles you would probably assume that I am pessimistic. Curiously enough, I am not entirely so. I feel convinced there must be a way forward for Christian publishing. However I have a strong feeling that it will be based, not around the model of the Christian bookshop as a major profit-making enterprise, but as the Christian bookshop as an expression of church service to the community. But I’m open to bright ideas. And I’m pretty sure our publishing companies are too.

Have a good week,

Chris

Comments (3)

By ChrisW, 13 November 2009 6:32 pm

If you remember my Lamb among the Stars books you will remember something called the Technology Protocols where the Assembly critically and carefully evaluated any technology before adopting it. This, of course, is in total contrast to our own dear world where we blunder in first and only worry later. Anyway this week I have been thinking about the Internet. My meditations were triggered by references to comments by Eugene Kaspersky, the eponymous Russian CEO of Kaspersky Labs, who wants the abolition of net anonymity and for us all to access a newer faster and cleaner web through a digital passport.

My ponderings were heightened when, having received an e-mail from the DXO Labs saying that version six of their excellent (if slightly expensive) photo processing software was now available I checked on the Internet for reviews on it. To my astonishment, I found that within two days of the software being launched six or seven sites were already claiming to offer cracked downloads. (Incidentally, don’t even think about it; there is an awful lot of evidence that most – if not all – of such sites are teaming with viruses.) So what are we to do with the Internet?

There’s certainly a lot morally wrong with the web. There is cracked software with viruses, porn, Facebook bullying, slander, an awful lot of lunacy as well as an almost infinite number of ways to separate you from your money. (We had a missionary friend staying with us last week who, while checking his e-mail, found that he had an apparently authentic message from an old friend saying that he was in Nigeria and had been robbed and urgently needed some money to get his passport replaced. It was merely the latest twist on an old, old scam.) I suppose too, if you want to look for them, there are also terrorists and paedophiles.

And yet…. I was talking at length recently with someone who has worked an awful lot with the cults and he said how difficult they are finding the Internet. In the ‘good old days’ the cults specialised in restricting information to members. Knowledge was trickled down on a need-to-know basis and very heavily censored. If a Jehovah’s Witness, say, wanted to find out any alternative view on their religion he or she had to find a Christian or secular bookshop and openly purchase a book. Now though, a few keystrokes will reveal websites of ex-members, lurid details of scandals and very good arguments against what is being taught. In short, in the age of Google it’s hard to hide dirty washing, whether it be intellectual or moral. And the best argument against Kaspersky’s dream of the new, passport-only Internet is that it would be a bad day for truth if it ever came to be. I have no doubt that there are those in Beijing, Saudi Arabia and say it not too loudly, the Kremlin, who would love to see such a tamed, controlled and neutered Internet.

So what do we do about the Internet? Quite simply I don’t know. The problem in evaluating the problem from a Christian point of view is that here several competing concerns come together. A first is the Christian commitment to the publishing the truth: for nearly three hundred years Christianity grew as an underground organisation. And I am old enough to have helped smuggle Bibles across the Iron Curtain. A second concern is that we wish to protect the weak; I may have seen through that Nigerian scam but would everybody? A third concern is that we know that there is a spirit of corruption in the world which ruins even good things so that, in hindsight, the corruption of the Internet was almost inevitable. ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is a profoundly Christian saying. That applies very well to the awesome transnational potential of the Internet.

Yet even if I have no specific remedy I have no doubt that we need to do some thinking about what is happening. The temptation is that because of the very complexity of the problem we simply shrug our shoulders in despair. I think Eugene Kaspersky is wrong but he is right to open the debate.