...for we do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your servants for Christ’s sake
We demonstrate our true attitude towards God by our attitude towards the idea of charity.
On the surface, we all love the idea of charity. We give to charity, we claim to believe in it, we hold high hopes for it… but we find it very difficult to receive. And this demonstrates our real attitude not only towards charity, but towards God. Both practically in our lives and spiritually in our souls, we are simply too
More and more people today are recognising that the word, “atheism”, is the greatest misnomer of them all. For in ‘real’ terms, all people have an object of worship. A-theism means to be ‘without God’ but an atheist is not without a God as such; he/she has simply rejected a particular God or selection of Gods.
After watching the election debate on immigration last night, it struck me that Nick Clegg’s policy on immigration is the perfect illustration of our attitude to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Why did Clegg have to backtrack on his rhetoric of ‘amnesty’ for illegal immigrants?
I had never written a song before last week but I was inspired somewhat whilst reading Psalm 17. Carry on reading (and listening) to see the result:
Wretched whore of a thousand lies
You tell yourself and then despise
The darkness of the life you live;
You hate your soul and can’t forgive.
Oscar Wilde was easily one of the finest brains ever to grace the British Isles. Not only was his mastery of the English language supreme, but his clarity of thought and ability to gauge the ‘reasons behind the reasons’ was second to none.
Of course I cannot agree with Wilde’s conclusions, that no external source could be the basis for the authority of the individual, “But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating.” These words point (as put perfectly by Imogen Black) “to an existentialist crisis, a man coming to realise that he has nothing but his own perceptions for truth who has made a god of himself.” Yet at the same time, despite this relativising of truth, which the Christian worldview cannot abide, I’m not sure that Wilde’s preferred vision of religion was so far removed from the kind of religion that Christ actually produced. Today I came upon this gem:
When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. (De Profundis, letter written in 1905)
If we unpack this statement, it proves to be quite revealing. Let us examine each statement in turn and compare it to the religion imagined by Jesus
The Wildian ‘ritual of agnosticism’, born out of the general existential crisis common to all humanity, at the final analysis is simply a yearning for the kind of religion that only Jesus Christ provides.
In the end, we see that Oscar Wilde’s desired “alternative religion for the faithless” is actually describing the Christian faith. Perhaps he realised this before he died, perhaps not. The question is: do you?
I watched “The Invention of Lying” a few months ago and didn’t really know what to make of it at the time. Of course it goes without saying that I’m a huge fan of Ricky Gervais’ comic genius so it was inevitable that I would find the film fairly amusing and clever at times (although not as good as “Ghost Town”)… but the film also clearly had a strong agenda; what to make of its final message?
Now that I’ve had a bit of time to reflect, it seems that the only conclusion I can come to is that the premise of the film is not actually very inventive. Ironic.
So what is the premise? Gervais makes no attempt to hide the fact that the film is based on one main idea: that the stories behind religion in general and the Christian faith in particular are little more than ‘invented’ fairytales. The conclusion is that even though the reality of this world amounts to nothing more than the bare facts of science, people actually need made up stories (aka. ‘lies’) to give them hope, meaning, excitement, purpose and expectation. (Another subtext was that fat guys need this kind of world, that goes beyond the bare facts of science, or else they would have no hope of getting beautiful women – but I guess that was just part of Gervais’ brilliantly self-deprecating humour!).
In the context of the film, the ‘fairytale’ that Gervais’ character makes up which signals the advent of lying is basically a religious system concerning a place in the sky ruled by a man in the sky who can provide a hope beyond death. This is what the people buy into with the result that it creates excitement, gives him power and initially leads to a more pleasant atmosphere, although this eventually breaks down (the implication being that belief in God is not actually beneficial for society or human flourishing).
Ultimately the thing that disturbed me most about the premise of the film was not so much the thinly veiled dig at Christianity; that is not really a novelty anymore. Neither was it the fact that Gervais has typically misrepresented most of the essential facts of Christianity; ideas such as God creating the world already full of evil and suffering and Christianity as a system of works-based salvation are completely alien to the Bible yet this too was to be expected from an atheist lobby that knows only how to caricature and misrepresent Christianity…
The message that disturbed me most was rather the one which emerged out of Gervais’ own secular framework. It was the message that promoted a ‘correct’ picture of reality where there are no (ultimate) happy endings and neither is there any real and ultimate justice, as in these ‘fairy stories’. In order to comfort his dying mother, Gervais’ character invents heaven, giving her the hope of a future, a purpose for her existence and a happy ending. Even though he ‘knows’ that there is no such thing as heaven and that her death will swallow up any meaning her life ever had, he retreats to the use of made up fairytales to help her in her final hour.
There are three problems here for the secularist:
The fundamentalist secular gospel – that there are no ultimate happy endings – might be coherent with the facts of science. But Gervais, in pointing us to a reality beyond the bare facts of science only ends up reinforcing the plausibility of the Christian narrative.
So how does the plausibility of the Christian narrative lead to faith in the Christian God?? And I will close with this.
C.S.Lewis put it best when he wrote that in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, “myth became fact”… All the myths and fairytales of human history could only ever have been seen as dim shadows and uncertain estimations of the nature and workings of the ultimate being who must be both benevolent and just. Yet in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the expectations of these myths were finally realised. The cross sees the ultimate dispensation of justice as well as the ultimate bestowal of love. Each person who trusts in this God is guaranteed by the resurrection of Christ that their relationship with the ‘man in the sky’ is assured. How? Because the ‘man in the sky’ became a man of flesh and died to redeem us and the world.
The film ends up being not very inventive at all, since the dreary, unimaginative world of bare facts is put forward as the real one and the world of myth, meaning and purpose as the false one.
Thought I would Wordle this blog to see what my collected writings thus far might look like as an image.
Voila!
Το δεύτερο μήνυμα στη σειρά «Η δόξα του Θεού»
Το πρώτο μήνυμα στην καινούρια σειρά για το 2009/10, «Η δόξα του Θεού»
Sermon preached at The First Greek Presbyterian Church of Athens, Spring 2009
Sermon preached at Carpenders Park Church, January 2008
Sermon preached at Bridge Lane Chapel on Sunday 3rd Jan 2010.
There are many who say, “Who will show us some good?” (Psalm 4v6)
We are all familiar with the countless stories of killers getting away scott-free because there was insufficient evidence to convict them. Here is an interesting take on this theme from our favourite tv series. Consider the quote below:
House: The universe always settles the score.
Dr. Cuddy: Does it?
House: No, but it should.
The idea of justice, the righting of wrongs and balancing of misdeeds – portrayed here as karma – is present in every major worldview and belief system.
Yet it is also a concept that has failed us in spectacular fashion. House puts it best here. Justice should exist. It is ‘supposed’ to exist and work to settle the score… but this is not what we see happening.
Enter Dexter, the tv show about an amoral serial killer, Dexter, who has been trained by his foster father to channel his sociopathic serial killer urges using a special ‘code’. According to “Harry’s Code”, only people who deserve to die are killed. So if you haven’t killed anyone in a premeditative way then you are safe from Dexter’s blade.
The series has been a runaway success. And I don’t think that it is just the tongue-in-cheek humour that creates this affection for Dexter. There is something disturbingly reassuring about the existence of such a character (even in the fantasy world of the small screen).
Take the average left-of-centre agnostic/atheist for instance (basically most educated people in London/Athens under 40):
Since they either don’t believe or struggle to believe in the existence of God, they cannot hope for a final calling in of accounts where perfect justice will one day be meted.
If they are left of centre, they are also against the death penalty as a solution, so they can’t rely on the state.
Taking matters into one’s own hands is not condoned and vigilantes are a unsavoury and misguided solution at best.
So Dexter is the perfect solution to the problem faced by the atheist. Dexter settles the score on behalf of the universe without obliging the viewer to condone what he is doing, as it is already established that what he is doing is wrong. Yet our delight in such a ‘neat’ solution is always a secret delight that we dare not admit. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth and still fails miserably at providing an ultimate answer as well anyway.
Even traditional religion cannot provide a solution to House’s problem. For it simply claims that one day all those nasty people will get their comeuppance. House’s words resonate with us because we too need to witness this principle of justice in action, to give us a hope that evil will not always be the status quo, that wrong will not win the day simply by its continued existence, let alone its escaping justice.
The only place this is even claimed by anyone to have happened is on the cross of Jesus Christ. A faultless man taking the place of guilty and evil men and satisfying the full demands of justice… This is what happened on the cross. Justice once and for all, for every deed. This might sound barbaric, but my hunch is that it only sounds barbaric to us because we have sanitised sin so much as to have effectively banished its ugliness from the vista of our lives. But this does not remove it… and nor it does make us any less liable to face justice for our own deeds.
For a world(view) without Christ, Dexter is not just a guilty pleasure, he is the final hope for any kind of justice. He is the disturbing solution to House’s question for those who reject God. No wonder House’s mouse is gagged – he asks all the most inconvenient questions.
If you are not currently a follower of Jesus Christ there are only two possible reasons:
1) You have not heard the Gospel
(this includes those who think they have heard but what they have heard is not actually the gospel of Jesus. ie. social gospel, prosperity “health and wealth” gospel, man-centred gospel etc.)
2) You have heard the Gospel and rejected it
(this would include all who hear a faithful exposition/explanation of the gospel and yet reject it – both those who reject what they are actually hearing and those who ‘think’ they are rejecting what they are hearing but are actually rejecting something else ie. they have – willfully or not – misunderstood it.)
I would just like to address this second group for a moment. You see, if accepting or rejecting the Gospel was purely a matter or rational engagement with the Gospel then we would say that the cleverer you are, the more likely you are to grasp it and accept it. This is patently not the case, either in terms of what we see happening or what the Bible actually says about how people become Christians.
Of course, the gospel ‘does’ contain a rational set of arguments. The Christian faith is not a leap in the dark since it ‘is’ based on certain facts that are established through investigation of the evidence and following certain data to its logical conclusion. But to reduce the gospel down to this is not only misleading regarding its content, it is also misleading regarding its purpose. The aim of explaining the gospel is not to ‘test’ people’s intelligence, so that the rational people pass and those of less mental capabilities fail. The content of the gospel, while historical and factual, is particularly concerned with the divine nature of one man, Jesus of Nazareth and the work he accomplished which transcends history itself… while the purpose of the gospel, though entailing a rational appeal, is particularly to do with bringing people into a relationship with a real, living God. This means that Christianity must be engaged with concurrently on two levels – one rational and one metaphysical.
Such a separation has already been suggested in the form of NOMA (non-overlapping magesteria), posited by atheistic evolutionist, Dr Stephen Jay Gould. It is dismissed by Professor Richard Dawkins, however, who argues that certainly no supernational religion can be established without miracles violating the laws of physics. He then goes on to argue pointedly people of faith are either not rational or else schizophrenic.
This brings me us back to the issue of rejecting the gospel. If we are not satisfied with Dawkins’ explanation, that people who believe what the Bible says are either stupid or somehow separating their brain from their heart, then how are we to explain the fact that when presented with the gospel some people (both intelligent and less so) accept it and others (both intelligent and less so) reject it. Is there another parameter that we need to consider?
I believe that there is and we can see it in the words of this beautiful hymn written by Bob Kauflin (you can hear/buy the song by clicking here – iTunes link):
I was blinded by my sin
Had no ears to hear Your voice
Did not know Your love within
Had no taste for heaven’s joys
Then Your Spirit gave me life
Opened up Your Word to me
Through the gospel of Your Son
Gave me endless hope and peace
Here we see both aspects of someone’s engagement with the Gospel:
(1) We have listed for us such faculties as eyes and ears, taste and the Word – the rational aspect. These are not just metaphors here, we need to use all of these things in order to engage with the gospel and to determine its whys and wherefores
(2) We also have listed for us ideas such as spiritual blindness and deafness, distaste for the things of God and inability to comprehend spiritual truth – the metaphysical aspect.
If you are rejecting the gospel today, you need to understand that you are rejecting it on both of these levels.
In other words, you cannot rest assured in the knowledge that you have ‘really’ rejected Christianity if you have rejected it (apparently) on the basis of rationality alone. Until you have also ruled out the possibility that you are ‘wilfully’ rejecting it at the same time, you must at least curb your smugness. For the will is not just influenced by the mind but also by the affections. Therefore, it is irresponsible to be smug about having ‘worked out all the holes in Christianity’ if you are overlooking the fact that your heart just might have had more to do with it than your head. If this is the case then it could even be that you are misrepresenting the facts to yourself and wilfully misunderstanding what you are hearing (assuming that the misunderstanding doesn’t stem from a failure of the person explaining it).
One of the oft-repeated phrases of Jesus in the Gospels is the following:
“He who has ears to hear let him hear.”
What does this cryptic declaration mean? It means simply that you might be ‘hearing’ and engaging with Jesus’ words but it is possible to grasp the rationale and yet still be deaf to the true meaning. Anyone can hear the claim that Jesus died for their sins. They can even repeat it themselves as a mantra. But it is only someone who has truly heard it as for themselves who can then say it with conviction as applying to them.
Just imagine that you are in love. It is reported to you by a mutual friend that this other person requites this love. Yet you are bitter inside from past rejection and even though you repeat this fact back to others, you do not say it with conviction or any kind of excitement because you do not believe it, even though it has been reported back to you reliably by others. You do not believe it, that is, until you hear it yourself and understand that it truly is for you. This might even be after the second or third time that you hear it from the person yourself… the bottom line is that with such matters, it will never be the facts alone that lead you to believe. Your heart must be persuaded as well as your head; true truth must be impressed upon your affections… Then you will find the difference in your vision to be so stark that it were as if you had been blind before.
“My sin – O the bliss of this glorious thought – my sin – not in part but in whole is nailed to the cross; and I bear it no more; praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul.” (Horatio G. Spafford)
It is certainly unfair and probably uncharitable to claim – as many evangelicals do – that Christianity is the only system that offers redemption. It may come in many forms and have many names; release from sin, from slavery, from the material world, from the ‘self’, from being unhappy, from being poor, from the body, from guilt… but redemption is the basic currency of the whole of metaphysics. It is not an invention of Christianity; rather, it has always been around and it has always been central.
That said, the fact that we have always felt the need for redemption does not mean that this need has ever been met. Why else would we still be looking? The problem with redemption is not that it is not being offered; ‘everyone’ is offering it. The problem is that it has never been offered in a complete form.
We must confess that, in contrast to the writer above, we do not find bliss in our own religion; instead we tend to find anxiety and failure coupled with exhortations to do better. If we are honest with ourselves, we ‘all’ find this to be the case regardless of whether our philosophy is theistic in nature or even completely secular.
This is what makes the work of Christ in history so astounding… and so glorious.
Being redeemed a little gives some relief, for sure. It may even bring some genuine hope for a season… but it always ends with despair. Why? Because being redeemed a little is not a gift, it is a curse – it is a curse to do the rest yourself. It lifts you up to imagine that you have what it takes and then dashes you to pieces as you realise that you can never do it. It is the sort of humiliation that inflates rather than neuters your pride, much like the harlot who leads a man on, then denies him the very thing she has led him to believe is his; the thing in which he has been led to invest his very soul. In doing so, she has turned him into a beast, wandering the moors like a cursed-animal, never able to accept being denied that which he had no right to claim in the first place.
This is what man-made religion does to us. It is an unfulfilled promise and it curses us to such an existence.
In stark contrast to this, the work of Jesus Christ fills us with bliss because it is a completed work that offers full – not in part but in whole – the redemption that we so crave. If redemption is the currency of metaphysics then Christ’s work, credited to us, makes Bill Gates (in analogous terms) look like a pauper compared to the Christian believer. Yet, please note in closing that the bliss does not come from the currency/redemption itself, as if this were a new source of pride, but from the Lord who gave it.
Considering Christ – his person and his work – fills a person with bliss of untold depth as they come to understand, and know, the glorious gift they have received by his grace. Consider Christ today. O the bliss of this glorious thought.
What though th’accuser roar
Of ills that I have done
I know them well, and thousands more;
Jehovah findeth none.
His be the Victor’s name
Who fought our fight alone;
Triumphant saints no honour claim;
Their conquest all his own.
This is the first and only poem thus far that I have written for Cynthia, my wife of two weeks. I finished it the day before our wedding, 4th April 2009…
This song concerns a princess;
The fairest in the land
And when I’m through with singing,
I hope you understand.
A true gem was this maiden,
The like you rarely find,