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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.

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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

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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.

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By ChrisW, 6 November 2009 6:39 pm

Thank you all for considering my mystery word last week. I think in the end I probably decided that it needs a combination of words: ‘unsensational-but-satisfying’, ‘delivers-the-goods’, ‘excellent-and-unflashy.’ I suspect that this sort of thing works much better in German than English.

I have just about recovered from my cold/flu. I have no idea whether it was the swine flu but I can’t remember ever having been knocked out so long. It’s a useful reminder not to take good health for granted!

I have started to run a series of lunchtime classes on what is called Critical Thinking. Critical thinking is the semi-formal process of analysing arguments to identify reasons and conclusions and whether the evidence fully justifies the claims. It’s an odd sort of subject; I suspect in the old days you probably did it as part of English GCSE. Nowadays it seems to have gone missing but our higher-level universities, notably Oxford and Cambridge, are increasingly setting test papers which require a fairly sophisticated analysis of arguments using this sort of approach. Anyway it was rather gratifying that my geology room was crammed full with 30+ students today, many of whom have a reasonable chance of being interviewed at least for Oxford and Cambridge. It is actually good because it encourages me to think logically.

I spoke at Swansea University Christian Union this week (it’s been a busy week) on God’s Omniscience, Omnipresence and Omnipotence. Phew! There were a hundred or so students and a good atmosphere. The one thing that somewhat perturbed me was that although I touched on all sorts of important and useful things the only questions I got afterwards were all to do with the creation and evolution debate; something that I had alluded to in the briefest possible manner. I find it somewhat disturbing that what is, by any account, a rather peripheral debate (we are all creationists in some sense  has taken centre stage.

What else? Without saying too much I have had a rather intriguing series of e-mails from someone (let’s just call him M.) from the Middle East who knows me as a professional geologist and who has been asking some interesting and penetrating questions about my Christian faith in a very friendly and open way. He has just asked me to explain the doctrine of the Trinity and how Christians can pray to Jesus without committing the sin of polytheism. Well that’s going to be an easy one isn’t it? (Is there an emoticon for irony?). That’s my next task this evening and I would value prayer.

Finally, for those of you who are fans of technology, Mr. Google has given us a nice new present which so far has not been widely publicised. If you use Google Earth (and I use it at least once or twice a day in teaching) turn on 3-D Buildings and Photorealistic on the side panel and take a look at New York, Birmingham, Cardiff or Dublin. All being well if you have a reasonably fast modem connection and a tolerable graphics card you should see the landscape slowly spring alive with wonderful 3-D buildings which really look realistic. (Two tricks for Google Earth that not everybody knows: 1. set vertical exaggeration to around 1.7 in order to make landscape look realistic and 2. use a mouse with a scroll wheel in the middle and press down on it. ) To say it’s awesome is an understatement: I showed it to our head of IT who one presumes has seen everything and twenty minutes later he was still playing with it  like a happy child. On a slightly reflective note, I’m actually wondering whether one of the side-effects of being made in the image of God is that we like to see things as he sees them. But that apart, it’s pretty awesome to swoop and wheel around the skyscrapers. I’m wondering if I do it enough whether it will cure my vertigo.

3D google

top-down skyscrapers

Have a good week!

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By ChrisW, 30 October 2009 6:30 pm

Well my flu is more or less over but I don’t feel inclined to tackle the heights of theological debate just at the moment, although thank you all for your contributions. Today I want to try something else and it’s still a slightly difficult topic. You see I was sitting in traffic the other day, listening to yet another volume in Suzuki’s excellent Bach series, and I tried – and failed – to come up with a word to describe the qualities of the performance. In the end I felt I that there probably wasn’t an English word to describe the sentiment I want to express. Not only that but I realised that if such an adjective existed I would be able to use it for an awful lot of things that I value. ‘Go on!’ I hear you say ‘what was it?’ Well here the problem begins because, of course, there isn’t a single word to describe it. If there was I wouldn’t be writing this blog would I?

Let’s start by saying that the missing adjective is an admirable quality that brings together virtues from three separate areas. First, it is close to such ideas as ‘reliable’, ‘trustworthy’ and ‘will never you down’. Yet it is more than merely reliable because it is also the quality of being consistently good and even excellent. Second, there is also something about it that is, well, understated: it doesn’t draw attention to itself, it isn’t flamboyant or garish but it just does what has to be done and does it well. In fact, it can be so understated that you even forget it’s there. A final aspect is that it is profoundly ‘comfortable’ and never awkward, unpleasant or challenging. The nearest word I can come to is the word ‘homely’ but that isn’t quite right. (If memory serves me correctly, in the old days if you couldn’t call a girl ‘pretty’ you called her ‘homely’ which was very definitely damning with faint praise.)

Do you sense what I’m trying to express? Perhaps you are fluent in a language in which such a word exists. If such a word was available in English then I would use it not just for this series, but for many other things. I might start with the trainers I am wearing at the moment (reliable, comfortable and very unflamboyant). I would use it (99% of the time) for the now ageing turbodiesel VW Golf that I go to work in. I have colleagues for whom I could probably use this word; dependable, easy to overlook but always pleasant and always comfortable to be with. I live in a house for which I could use the word. I have at least one anorak which would be accurately described this way. Many of us are fortunate enough to have marriage partners who we would happily describe with such an adjective. I’ve no doubt that C S Lewis had pubs (especially on wet winter nights) for which he would have used such a word gladly. In fact, I’m fairly certain that no single word exists in English. If it did I have no doubt it would be used frequently by poets and writers for the English rural landscape itself, for it applies to that: consistently good, quietly understated and easy to be at home with.

By now you are probably thinking well this will be one of those rare blogs where Chris doesn’t bring in Christianity. Well I’m sorry to disappoint you; isn’t it precisely this sort of quality (unfailing, unobtrusive, and never irritating) than actually conveys the sort of consistent Christian life that we really ought to live? Yet the interesting thing is that these qualities are rarely trumpeted as being desirable values today. It seems to me that we are in danger of being taught to applaud only the dramatic and even the shocking rather than those things that are ‘merely’ good, decent and workmanlike. Passion and even infatuation are elevated over affection and compassion. We are asked to applaud celebrities and megastars with their towering and brittle egos rather than men and women who do ordinary jobs effectively modestly and with grace. No, whatever we decide we could call my mystery virtue, I think I’ll happily stick with that.

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By ChrisW, 23 October 2009 7:34 pm

There were a number of possible topics to write on this week but I am disinclined to touch them. In part it is that I am a bit drained because I have just had flu and also because I have just upgraded my computer to Windows 7. (Very nice, thank you, but it’s really just Vista working as it ought to have done.) Instead I think I will look at one or two of the issues raised in the blog two weeks ago on ‘K’s Argument’. K, very kindly, has come out fighting in defence of fundamentalism as being at least logically consistent. This of course raises the interesting question ‘What is fundamentalism?’ I remember a member of our church coming to me at the end of one service with a worried look and asking me in that quiet ‘I-do-not-wish-to-be-overheard’ tone of voice, ‘Chris, am I a fundamentalist?’

You could of course try and define fundamentalism in terms of specific creedal beliefs; such as believing in a creation in a literal six days, holding to the authorship of Isaiah by a single person, not doubting a single miracle in Scripture, belief in an imminent Rapture, etc. I think however this is very difficult on all sorts of grounds. Let’s say you came up with ten criteria, what you do? Give a ‘Fundamentalism Index? ‘He’s a 10 out of 10 fundamentalist.’ It all seems rather mechanical. Besides how do we know which fundamentals are truly fundamental?

It also seems to overlook the fact that we vaguely know that there is more to fundamentalism than simply holding to a tight creedal confession.  Now please don’t get me wrong, creeds are vitally important but I would hazard a guess that there is something else going on here. In fact I think that Catherine (who I don’t always agree with!) is close to the mark when she describes fundamentalism as easy. There is indeed a simplicity to fundamentalism; it is a religion that shuns questioning. And when you get rid of questions life becomes really quite simple. You are all singing from the same hymn sheet because there is no other hymn sheet (and if there is, those who sing from it are going to hell). Yet I think behind that is something else and I think it is fear.

A nice image I came across a number of years ago and I wish I could remember who coined it said that the difference between fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism is something like the difference in mediaeval times between a walled city and a market town. Fundamentalism is a religion of barriers, battlements and, just occasionally, burning oil. It is haunted by the fear of the enemy (and isn’t there always an enemy?). The enemy may be Catholics, New-Agers or – most dangerous of all because they are wolves in sheep’s clothing – Liberals. There is no engagement with the enemy, no dialogue. All there is survival and conflict. As the Rev Ian Paisley used to shout with his all too imitable Ulster accent: ‘No Surrender!’

Here Conservative Evangelicalism is very different. (I’m sorry about the clunky term but I think it’s best used here because it’s the faith that on the surface can appear to be most similar to fundamentalism.) At the heart of Conservative Evangelicalism is the relationship with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit. That affects everything, not least how we view others. With them there is (or ought to be) a courteous engagement, an open debating, a confident discussion. But to go back to the imagery; the gates are flung open. Yes it’s risky, but that’s the way it ought to be. You can’t do evangelism from behind the ramparts.

Anyway that’s my take on it. But I’m open for further discussions. Now if you excuse me I’ll go and  take my cough medicine…

Comments (2)

By ChrisW, 16 October 2009 6:00 pm

I see that they have just awarded the Nobel prizes. I have no particular comment to make on the most widely noted one (Barrack Obama’s award for peace) except that given that he has at least three years left in the White House, it is perhaps well, a little premature.

What did cross my mind was that if there were a Christian version of the Nobel prizes I’d certainly award one for the man or woman who could come up the right thing to say to those who you meet who have close relatives facing death. I have two colleagues/friends at the moment in this sort of situation, one where the affected relative is in their 20s; the other late 50s. It’s not easy to know what to say. At an earlier stage of their cancer, one could offer to pray for healing and I did, but now with both having developed secondaries and been pronounced incurable I’m less inclined that way. The problem is that however we phrase it, (and boy, do people avoid spelling it out) they face death.

Interestingly enough I actually hesitated writing that last little word, death and instead wrote ‘the big D’. And that of course is part of the issue. It’s not a case of applying the Christian solution to a problem, it’s that we are now so far back that we barely recognise there is a problem until it is staring us in the face. Today, death is the great unmentionable; the thing above all that that we must not talk about. An alien living amongst us might assume that modern humans believe that our life is endless because we so rarely talk of its ending. The result is we now live in what is effectively the worst of all possible worlds in this respect. Our culture has lost the Christian hope of resurrection beyond the grave but not regained the social and intellectual defences that most pagan societies have to enable them to handle the monstrosity of death. We don’t really know what death is except that it is an abomination and that it tears at the very fabric of our lives.

As with so many trends in the secular world there is a parallel (if slightly muted version) in the church. Within Christianity we pray for healing, rejoice that aches and pains have gone away in the name of Jesus, talk in distant and abstract terms about heaven and glory but rarely, if ever, dwell on the inevitable termination of bodily existence. It may be that it is a little bit of the trend I talked about last week, that we have decided to become so seeker-friendly in our churches that we don’t want to put people off by mentioning the great unmentionable. Even if it is an unavoidable unmentionable.

Let me make two cautious and related observations. The first is that these times of bereavement or impending bereavement are probably the worst time to share the Christian view of death, suffering and resurrection through Christ. There is too much aching and hurting for lectures. Such vital beliefs probably need to be taught (and rehearsed) in times when the sun shines, not when the clouds are gathering. You practice fire drills well before fires, not during them.

The second is that we probably ought to declare our belief in eternal life through Christ more readily and more frequently than we do. Again, difficult times are the worst times for us to come up with our own personal views on death. As I have mentioned recently I am currently listening through a lot of Bach’s cantatas. One of the plus points of doing this is that (particularly when I read the words in translation) I am exposed to a lot of nearly 400-year-old Lutheran theology from a very different church world. They did things differently there and it helps me put my own 21st-century faith in perspective. One of them, No. 161 has a title whose very words make you blink: Komm, du süße Todesstunde which is perhaps best translated ‘Come, O sweet hour of death’. A few lines give you its flavour:

“Pale death is my rosy dawn,
with this rises for me the sun
of glory and heavenly delight.

Therefore I sigh truly from the depths of my heart
for the last hour of death alone.
I desire to pasture soon with Christ.
I desire to depart from this world.”

Universally, modern commentators, even Christian ones, struggle with such sentiments. Yet we cannot accuse Bach, of all people, of being naïve about death; I forget how many of his children died in infancy, and on one appalling occasion he returned from a relatively short trip to find his wife dead and buried. It may be that he, and what theologians call the German Pietist school, went too far in looking on the bright side of death. But surely it seems undeniable that we have gone too far in the other direction.