Who is the Church for?

Throughout my years of Reader ministry and my administrative work for the Church of England, my passion was that the Church was there for people who were not members.Those who thought of themselves as 'members' were part of the Church with a job to do of simply being there for others. For me the job was not winning people to the faith; faith is vastly more complex and elusive. It has been described as a gift; one which for me has proved elusive. Yet I know people to whom it had been given and fully respect that.

Two recent articles offer food for thought.

Simon Jenkins, quite rightly, loves church buildings, and we have many wonderful examples. His anxiety is that dwindling congregations simply cannot carry the burden they present. Alternative uses are needed. 

Rowan Williams takes a different tack and explores the needs we humans have for connections. He sees science as a place for conversation to understand our place in the world. Art opens door to experiences which are not our own, uncovering connections where we have not expected them. Religion is about the 'other' who claims our attention, our contemplation and our active generosity. The 'other' may be found in every human being as vehicles for God's presence. 

Williams doesn't bang the drum for christianity, as might be expected from a former Archbishop of Canterbury. Instead he stands as a friend to those of us who seek understanding of our lives.  

So, back to The Repair Shop and those looking down from above. Who can say yea or nay to that? What is abundantly true is that memories of those whom we love are precious and sometimes painful  A few benefit from the repair of loved possessions. Perhaps others can benefit from the space a church building can offer. For some it may be a half-remembered faith, for many it may be a question that can never be fully answered. 

The grace of God has dawned upon the world with healing for all mankind

The grace of God has dawned upon the world with healing for all mankind. (Titus 2:11-14)

I wonder what the dawn was like that first Christmas morning. Who saw the dawn this morning?

To us the dawn is a rare thing to see and of no great importance. The contrast with even fifty years ago is stark. Shepherds would long for the dawn to make sure their flock was safe. In the war with the blackout people longed for daylight which the dawn brought. 

And there is something very remarkable about dawn. You can have yours eyes pealed looking for it, you can often be misled by what seems to be light but is perhaps only a cloud moving, but eventually you see the spreading and growing light in the eastern sky - and you then know that dawn has broken; but only after the event.

What did the shepherds feel that first Christmas dawn? Tired I should think being up all night being visited by angels and go off to a stable to visit a new born baby. But they were also confused - what did it all mean?

Very much like the dawn, the significance of that birth only became clear much later - as the light from Jesus spread through the Gallilean countryside as he walked about that hot dusty countryside with his friends - it was only then that people realised the kind of dawn that had broken that first Christmas day.

St Paul tells us that what had dawned was the grace of God. That remarkable theologian, WH Vanstone, pondered what this meant and he found that the words the 'grace of God' appear no where in the Old Testament, but that the New Testament is positively littered with them. He looked at what the word grace meant in the language that was used 2000 years ago.

It is actually a very special word because it means something for both the act itself and the way in which the act is received. The single word embraces both the welcome thing that happens and the response which it naturally and inevitably evokes.

In the Old Testament we hear much of God's goodness. We hear and respect virtues - speaking of someone as just, kind, loving or merciful is a sign of our respect for them. But just because we respect these virtues doesn't mean that we always enjoy them. Forgiveness can so often be taken as condescension. Kindness can be oppressive - The old story of the worthy parishioner who is always doing kindnesses to people: and how can you tell the recipients of the kindness? You can tell them by their haunted look. Virtuous people sometimes have a habit of taking over the person they are helping. The virtue of love too - when love is not met by a loving answer it is painful to the lover, and threatening to the beloved. These are all divine virtues rightly respected but not necessarily always attractive.

Grace, by contrast, is the manner in which those virtues can be expressed - the grace of God wins from mankind our response of gratitude and joy - it is kindness ,but with seeing things from our point of view; it is being tactful, being considerate, 

It is the new thing that is shown in and received from Jesus Christ.

And if we look at the way Christ loved, not just in his death but in his everyday dealings, we find a graceous love. He doesn't seek to possess or control - very much the opposite he lets everyone make and then learn from their own mistakes. He has no magic wand, all the time he leads us to make our own journey  - he teaches in parables rather than setting out a list of rules so it is up to us to discover the truth. When he forgives, he doesn't make the sinner feel small but gives them something to do, welcoming them back to work. The story of Zacchaeus the tax collector expresses this; Jesus didn't say to him I forgive you for your misdeeds or I will forgive you if you apologise, no Jesus healed and saved Zacchaeus by asking a small kindness - hospitality for the night.

Jesus knew what it is like to be human, he knew the mix bag that we are - good sometimes, bad or silly or unwise at others. The grace of God that dawned was the realisation that the God who created us does see things from our point of view - loves us in a way the only response to which is joyful gratitude.

Imaginative Hope - 2020

Imagine a charismatic young man who questions the status quo; who champions the poor, sick and disadvantaged. Imagine that many people follow him for he has given them hope that there is a better way. Imagine, then, how the establishment might view him. Imagine that they take their resentment to the ultimate conclusion and have him murdered in the cruelest and most cowardly way possible.
Imagine then that the body was buried but somehow was taken from its burial place.
The world then (for the imagined story is 2000 years old) was a place where the very air you breathed was laced with religion; it was the accepted world order. It had been so for the young man and for his followers and so it is not surprising that the absence of the body and the whole story of his life was reinterpreted in religious terms. I wonder too whether, when you really want to believe something, it in some way becomes true. The encounter on the road to Emmaus may perhaps be an example.
Could this be the story of Jesus? And if it is, is that it?
At heart there was what some people call the Nazareth Manifesto:
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."
I just wonder whether the reversal of the world order, of which the young man spoke, is possible? Perhaps now, with the world turned upside down, its time has come for 'imaginative hope' to take the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury in his sermon for Easter, 'we dare to have hope in life before death'.

Easter 2020

Easter presents the greatest challenge to faith, surely as experienced most by the first followers of Jesus, yet it contains too the rock upon which faith is built; or so they say.
There is a prayer I used to use as a Reader which went something like, ' I believe, help thou my unbelief'.
These two states live together.
Giles Fraser's article in today's Guardian (http://bit.ly/1hbNYsD) articulated this conundrum very well. He did not, though, grasp what to me is an increasing crucial distinction between faith and religion.
Philip Pullman's excellent short book, the Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, explored, through a fictional account of the gospel stories, how Jesus was in effect stolen from ordinary people by men of religion. Jesus was and is a man for all people, not just the religious or righteous. So it is a tragedy when good people turn away from religion to atheism abandoning Jesus on the way.

Half-forgotten faith

I wrote this in January 2012.
I assisted with Communion on Christmas Day and witnessed an astonishing variety of half-forgotten devotion. This is not to belittle. We had people from so many traditions, but I would swear much half-forgotten in the rush of the modern world.
It is in this half-forgetting that I have found signs of hope. Half-forgotten also means half-remembered; it means that once there was something. Perhaps it is to these who once were here, to whom the cathedral should direct its attention? If they were here once, then why not now? It is perhaps a good question. But there is more.
My sense on Christmas Day was of the importance of the sacramental act in which they were participating in their half-remembered way, rather than the meaning of any finely crafted words, and they were finely crafted. Yet at Christmas perhaps more than any time, words are part of the half-remembered act: ‘In the beginning…’ goose bumps rise on my arms as I write. Half-remembered words which have a deep echo in the hearts of those who once were here.

Prime Ministers and Church

I posted on Facebook a short piece expressing my sadness that we now have Prime Minister who does not see fit to go to Church on Christmas Day. Some people agreed; one, however, preferred this to the hypocrisy of someone attending without believing.
This got me thinking, yet again, about what we mean by faith.
I have no doubt that some people are the recipients of a 'gift of faith'; they just have it. They have placed their trust in Jesus Christ, and live out their lives on that basis. There are then those, and I was one, who longed for such faith, but could never quite grasp it. I tried every which way, not least by attempting to create an intellectual framework that would justify belief. I failed.
There is more. I have previously written about those who come to Christmas Day Eucharist with a 'half forgotten' faith. A friend expressed is slightly differently as being 'hard wired' with a belief system that had been taught from the cradle and which is there for life, however much the owner may intellectually dismiss it.
There are many more who will speak quite happily of a loved one, who has died, looking down on them. Just watch any edition of BBC's Repair Shop where treasured possessions are brought back t life. Such a belief in Life after Death was a comparative latecomer to Judaism in the centuries before Christ's birth, but it was embraced by the early Church.
A church at Christmas is a meeting place where all these people can come together for their disparate purposes. It is a gathering where the individual is not centre stage, and where a group of otherwise unconnected people can spend an hour thinking (or praying) about those others who are less fortunate. It gives space for contemplating big questions. It can be a space where people gather around a shared ethical framework.
I would have thought that this is just the place for a Prime Minister.

What is faith?

What is faith, what is religious experience?

Is it the flood of tears that met me on the way back from Launde all those years ago after the exploration of the passover and the eucharist? Was it then those with whom I shared the experience; were they special?

Is it Sunday evening in Kirby Bellars church with Graham, Malcolm and me robing to the smell of the portable gas fires after which we would say Cranmer’s words and read the King James Bible and offer our gloss on it to the faithful few?

Is it Sunday morning at Portloe with those faithful and questioning Christians who would want to argue the toss rather than accepting whatever I said? Was it Ruan, Wartnaby or one of the churches in the Vale where the speaking out of the liturgy week by week offered a transfusion to replenish that which dispels into daily life? 

Ironically is my faith too grounded in church? Is my experience of the Christian life too church centric? The awakening in Thrussington over twenty years ago by that retired priest whose name is lost in time, whose words are lost so that all that remains is the man in his cassock. Which brings me of course to the other man in the cassock whom I met in Philleigh and whom initially I thought of as too much caricature, but who possessed a deeper understanding of our faith than anyone I have ever met.

This then was shattered by the institution of the church which acts in so secular a way. It demands power and obedience. It ignores love and strives only for success.

Jesus failed. He was nailed to a cross. That we can find in this, victory is the Christian ability to turn things on their head to deny entirely the things of this world and to think only of a better realm. Is this realm to come? That is the question: in some sort of life after death for the individual, or at some future time in human existence? 

Does this look in the right direction? My Jewish friends find refreshment in the faithful acting out of the forming events of their religion or race. This is not to knock, but that is what it is, a devotion to what has gone before. Is it then some Christian ritual which, by its intricacy and method, can draw from self a response.

A little while ago I heard the suggestion that it all about hard wiring. Those of us brought up with church and Christian teaching cannot totally let it go; it has become part of our DNA. Or is it something else, in us but apart from us?

The journey goes on.

Good Friday 2016 saw me in St Nicholas Newport Lincoln after Jane’s lunchtime lecture on Macbeth. Jane was at her most brilliant digging as she always does into the air the writer was breathing. The Hermeneutic Tradition fed the English Renaissance through people like Francis Bacon who were breathing into the same air. Shakespeare would pick up the ideas and thinking. He added these to stories handed down through the ages, for example of witches - who in Elizabethan times were still being burnt. Jane explored the psychology of just what it was that entered Macbeth and indeed Lady Macbeth.

This links to the account of the passion, certainly through Luke who talks of Satan entering Judas.

So to St Nicholas and the liturgy of the passion. We heard a prophetic reading from Isaiah, a short passage from Hebrews and then the St John passion. This was followed by a long period of prayer when we admitted to the wrongs done to Jesus. I visualised the children drowning in the Aegean, the woman who went alive into the furnace at Auschwitz, the airmen who died on the long march and the crew who died in bombers. The long list of those innocent who have died or suffered as a result of man’s sin.

I wonder whether Jesus died for them, the sinned against, to be alongside those who suffer? 

With thanks to Jim Newton

The hijacking of Jesus

They have taken my Lord…and I know not where they have laid him

These well known words of Mary are of course words of Easter, and now we are approaching Advent, so why?

The ‘why’ is serendipitous. Last year Maggie told me of a review she had heard of a Man Booker Prize shortlisted book, I promptly added it to my birthday list and my daughter, Jo, duly gave it to me. I started to read it, but failed to get into it; I put it down. This September I took it up again and have found it revolutionary, or do I mean revelatory?

Colm Toibin’s immensely moving book, the Testament of Mary, seeks to tell the story of Jesus from the point of view of his mother. From this vantage point we are shown a number of the events familiar through the Biblical accounts, principally the Wedding at Cana and the Raising of Lazarus, though nothing can prepare us for the account of the crucifixion. A mother witnessing unbelievable agony in her son is an image for which we cannot prepare. In the book it is short and sharp and stuns.

Whilst this image is central, the theme of the book is that Jesus, a good man, has been ‘hijacked’ by those who want more. They form an hysterical group around him and egg him on. The chill in the story emerges with grey shadowy men who seek to control Mary into her old age. They want from her an account of what happened that fits with their agenda. She resists. Everything seems to be orchestrated by men in power, essentially weak men who exert control through fear.

As she approaches her death, these men tell her what her son has achieved. Phrases which might be recognised as articles of faith are trotted out and fall flat in the context of what Mary, the heart broken mother, knows. She concludes, that, no, it wasn’t worth it.

The whole book is powerful. There are passages which strike strong chords with ‘middle C’ of my previous post. The scene where there are men in hierarchies who demand to be listened to - surely a deliberate construct of the author, but one which seems to fit. The painstaking but angry work of the fictional ‘gospel’ writers as they wrestle with the difference between what Mary remembers and the theme they are determined to project.

The book, as did Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, again poses the question of whether the man we know as Jesus was hijacked by the religious men of his time, as, I might suggest, he is perhaps hijacked by the architects of great churches, composers of the great choral works, painters and sculptors, even preachers who use his stories to perfect the composition and delivery of ten minutes of thought provoking Sunday morning prose (present company excepted!).

Christmas 2018

Christians are taught that it is Easter and not Christmas that is the major feast in the calendar, because it was at Easter that Jesus rose from the dead to save mankind.

If I step away from the theology and dig, if not deeper, then certainly in a different direction, I am drawn back to Christmas as the birth day of an exceptional human being, perhaps the exceptional human being. The historical Jesus was by any measure remarkable. He did ‘love his neighbour’, he did welcome the outcast and stranger, he did live an exemplary life. He walked the walk.

So, it is with a mixture of joy and challenge that I, and perhaps other people of any belief and none, can celebrate this, his birthday.

The crib in Lincoln Cathedral just by the altar, just where it should be

The nave is ready to welcome all to explore this mystery that has troubled humankind for two millennia 

Michael Curry at the Royal Wedding

Bishop Michael Curry’s address at Meghan and Harry’s wedding said nothing new; it said nothing that is not in the mainstream of Christian belief.

So, why are commentators going on about it? Why are they saying that nothing like it would have been heard before in St George’s Chapel?

I think the answer is simple. None have been brave enough, committed enough to tell it as it is. God is Love; they are synonymous. The power of love can overcome all. It is at the heart of the Christian faith: the victory of love seen most vividly in the metaphor of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

If that is the case, why then do I have bookshelves crammed with explorations of theology?

Is it that they are an excuse for not saying it as it is, for, if you do, if you say that the power of love overcomes all, there is no longer an excuse for not doing something about it.

Meghan and Harry have shown in their lives so far, a passion for the outcast. The articulation of the power of love will surely drive them onward and upward.

I don’t think that this leads to piety with all its ‘spoil sport’ connotations. It leads to a life full in every sense.

It does beg the question of why we listen to sermons rather than getting on with the job?

I add a postscript, and deliberately a postscript.

Michael Curry’s presence and that of a British gospel choir said something with I dearly hope will be huge about inclusivity. People of colour have lived in these island probably for eight centuries if not more. That some have now been at the very focus of national celebration is both wonderful and dreadfully overdue.

Why a postscript, if it is so important? Because it should be ordinary; because in good places it is ordinary where people, irrespective of colour or any other difference, live in harmony.

Love has the power to make this the norm.

God?

Simon Jenkins' article on Quakers and the report that some see belief in God as a barrier, and my godson's observations, prompted me to think further on my journey of faith.

As I have written before, I don't need the concept of God in order better to understand life or the universe. I fully understand that previous generations did, but I don't.

I do however value the life, death and teaching of Jesus.

I see the world as a miracle. A flower, a tiny insect, even a leaf take the breath away and this is a very long way behind human intelligence. It is all incredible, hence the adherence of previous generations to the idea of a creator. But it is credible, albeit not yet fully understood.

The world though is populated by human beings who are hopelessly flawed. The delicacy of creation is totally vulnerable to the idiocy of mankind.

This is where, for me, Jesus comes in. Follow his life and teaching and the world becomes safe for all, or nearly all: for them, the natural world is still capable of awful disaster. Mankind can nonetheless revere and cherish its environment and love its neighbour.

Is it naive? Of course it is, but that only makes it harder, not impossible.

As I have also written before, Christianity hi-jacked Jesus and shrouded him in religion. Jesus himself spoke in religious terms, but this is hardly surprising since Judaism was the very air he breathed. It is not though the air we breath and so we should be free to follow him without the trappings of religion.

I wrote about valuing the life and death, as well as the teaching of Jesus. Valuing his life is about valuing the stories in the gospels, with what I term the Pullman caveat. I have written about Philip Pullman's book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ in which he seeks to separate the two. I value the good man.

But, I also value his death. This is where it gets flimsy. I have read or heard the accounts of the passion of Jesus many times. They are intensely moving and rich in metaphor. I value them in the way they speak of that which is beyond reach.

The devastation of the Moria refugee camp following heavy rain. If there is a God, in some sense that God was there. 

A Reflection from stir up Sunday 2017

I went to a service in Portloe on Sunday, some six and a half years since I took my last one there before moving to Lincoln. Much has happened and the time has come to stand back and reflect.

My five years in Cornwall were in a sense steeped in religion. I was a very active Lay Reader taking services most Sundays. I took school assemblies and certainly put energy and structure into the school's Friday visit to Veryan church. I visited the elderly and loved them very much. I took funerals. In my studies, I more than touched on theology. I made a very dear friend in Peter Durnford and we had many conversations about faith. We took services together, which was wonderful.

I put myself forward for ordination and spent time with Julia, the DDO, exploring and searching. I went to a selection conference and was turned down. I was about to try again when I was approached about taking the job of Chapter Clerk and Chief Executive at Lincoln Cathedral. I am certain I was right to take it, since living in Cornwall was not good for Maggie and me, being so far from our family.

As I reflect on my time in Cornwall, I feel positive about my work with older people. On many occasions, as I would take Holy Communion to them in their homes, I would become aware that they were reciting from memory the words from the Prayer Book: something deeply engrained from happier times, perhaps.

I also feel positive about bringing school into church, but I do worry. We tell the children the bible stories and they believe them like all the stories they hear. As they grow up they realise that, like those other stories, they were not true in any literal sense and the stories and all that went with them are consigned to what was once the nursery floor. I hope that something stays that will itch from time to time and prompt a little quiet reflection.

There were three quite distinct congregations in each of the three villages. One was simply but fiercely determined that the church would keep going. Another was confident in its place. A third was prayerful and enquiring. All, I am sure, were a force for good.

Lincoln Cathedral was a huge challenge and more on that elsewhere.

I tried to exercise a Reader Ministry in Waddington, a funny old C of E congregation. One man, whose name I forget, said to me after one service that I preach very well, but 'you don't really believe it'.

He was right.

I didn't; I don't believe as required by the 39 Articles. My world is explained without a god. The stories in the Bible are just that, stories, but like all good stories they hold meaning for those who would listen. I shudder at many bible passages, at the words of hymns and prayers.

I went to morning prayer ever weekday in the cathedral and there read much of the Bible. I was struck by how I would pray and so place into someone else's hands all the problems of the world. I put my energy into the institution and the building, really as I had done during my years as Diocesan Secretary.

Once I had left the cathedral, I didn't go to church for ages, but then started going occasionally to St Nicholas, with Hugh its wonderful priest. It didn't work. I didn't fit and, however good Hugh was, belief eluded me. I stopped going.

CompasssionateLincoln, a short time in Lesvos working with refugees and efforts to keep the Drill Hall open have become my exercise of christianity. Doing rather than praying. It feels better.

So at Portloe on Stir up Sunday, the new vicar, Phil, preached on Matthew 25:31-46 speaking of doing and of people, not of buildings or institutions. Doing fulfils both the doer and the done to. He read George Herbert's poem Peace with its organic link into the eucharist. He didn't labour judgement, but confession mattered.

I am drawn to a passage from Luke 17:21, words use by Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, 'the kingdom of God is within'. Can I say that what matters is inside each of us, how we use it and not laying it off to some all-powerful being outside us?

As is obvious, I am still on a journey.

Christian doubt and St Mark

This Easter morning, I ate a meal of bread and wine (and fish) with about fifty people on Pendower Beach on the south Cornish coast. I had walked the mile to the beach and had listened to the dawn chorus. We watched the sun rise over the Nare Head.

A few years ago I would have been swept up in the greatest of the Christian festivals. Now I doubt.

I wrote on Good Friday how that for me is the most significant day in the Christian year. Easter Sunday with all its rejoicing just jars. Good friends post on Facebook, Alleluia Christ had Risen. I love them for it. I just no longer know what it means.

St Mark, who wrote the earliest of the four gospels may have had a similar difficulty.

I wonder if I am alone in valuing the way St Mark approaches the Easter story.

The women go to the tomb early and find it open. They see a young man who tells that the Jesus is risen and that they should follow him to Galilee.

St Mark then tells us that they go away terrified and bewildered; more than that, they tell no one of what they have seen. And that's it.

Yet, possibly like St Mark, I don’t walk away. The life and death of Jesus is abundant in significance, relevance and meaning. It is the rest that I have trouble with. I guess I am with Philip Pullman, but not entirely.

The life and death of Jesus hold an imperative to us who inhabit the world. We must love our enemy, we must care for those left out, we must tend our planet.

Happy Easter!

The sun already up! A few years ago.

Good Friday

In recent years, Good Friday has become more and more important to me and is now the most important day in the Christian calendar. Let me explain.

The historical character, Jesus, stood unequivocally for love.

I place that assertion in its own paragraph because it is so hard to grasp. Can anyone do this? Should anyone do this? Is he an historical character?

For the third question, I refer back to this article and my observations on Philip Pullman’s book The Good An Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

For the first two, I turn to the gospel accounts of his life. He really did.

It is, though, something we just can’t stomach. It’s not practical; it’s not how the world is. It goes against the flow; it runs counter to how societies work. It was for that reason that he was killed on Good Friday.

He stood up for love and we couldn’t hack it. If this weren’t bad enough, he stood up for outcasts, for people who have left or never belonged to society. On Good Friday his love drew him to the depths of human suffering.

If this is at the heart of the Christian message, then it is the inspiration we need for right living.

Sinner or Miracle

All human beings are miracles to whom the only possible response is to offer love.

This, said to me by a clergyman friend, jars so completely with a church convinced that we are all sinners and which sees its sole job as saving them.

The world and humanity are, of course, messy. We might be miracles but we are not all or always good people. We do though manage to do good things from time to time, perhaps despite ourselves.

Imagine a church where we don't confess our sins in the hope of the slate being wiped clean by absolution, but rather reflect on what good we have done and plan to do.

St Mark and Easter

I wonder if I am alone in valuing the way St Mark approaches the Easter story.

The women go to the tomb early and find it open. They see a young man who tells that the Jesus is risen and that they should follow him to Galilee.

St Mark then tells us that they go away terrified and bewildered; more than that, they tell no one of what they have seen. And that's it.

On Maundy Thursday I visited Coventry Cathedral for the first time. All was ready for Good Friday. I was researching for my book on WW1 and the cross of nails couldn't seem more right.

I went to the Good Friday mediation at St Nicholas in Lincoln. The thoughts in my mind were of boys dying in the trenches, children in agony from chemical weapons in Syria, people of all ages starving in East Africa. This seemed to speak to the world of today.

On Sunday I went to a busy Church in Manchester full of people filled with the joy of Easter. This jarred. Whatever happened on the cross did not put an end to death; death still has its sting.

So, what did the cross do? Like the women on that first Easter Day, I am bewildered. I do believe that there is meaning in Jesus' life and death. In his life, he shows us a way to a fulness of living. In his death he stands with all the pain of world.

Perhaps that is all. If it is, it is still vastly more than words of Easter concerned mainly with some sort of personal salvation.

What is love?

I wrote this just before Valentine's day in 2015; you read it at the earliest in Holy Week 2016 - two wonderful examples of the complexity of the question ‘What is Love?’; the word ‘love’ has so many meanings.

Every month I go along to Lincoln Drill Hall for something called the Philosophy Cafe, really just a group of people meeting to explore ‘philosophical’ questions like, ‘what is love’, ‘what makes me, me.’ On occasions I have been asked to introduce the discussion and I was working away at how to introduce the question ‘what is love.’ I decided to quote from St Paul Corinthians 13, Shakespeare Sonnet 116 and the four (or more) words the ancient Greeks had for love. I was shot down; to use an extract from the Bible would offend some people and that would destroy the discussion. We couldn’t agree, so someone else introduced the discussion using only the Greek words.

It set me thinking.

I accept that to some people the Bible might be divisive, but in one sense what it is, is just the thinking of a middle eastern people between two and four millennia ago. So, not so very different to the writings from around the same time from the Greek world.

The Bible, Shakespeare and the literature of the ancient Greeks are, together with a few other bits, the foundation of the English language; they are the ‘air we breathe.’ I suspect that no-one in the Drill Hall talking about what is love, will not have been influenced in their thinking by at least one of these sources and probably by all three. To exclude the Bible because it may offend is nonsense.

As Christians, we believe that the Bible is more; it is God’s word or at the very least an account of man’s relationship with God. The Bible responds to the question ‘What is Love?’ with the answer, God is love.

What fascinated me in the discussion about love without the Bible, was that many people saw love as underlying everything. Whatever Greek meaning was taken, romantic love, family love, friendship or love for mankind - charity, the meaning that St Paul used -,  we seemed to come back to the same point that love underlies everything, like God really.

May I wish you a very happy Easter

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

This book is both disturbing and rewarding. Whilst Pullman emphasises that it is a story, it does follow, in a great many respects, the story of Jesus as told in the Gospels.

There is a jarring early on as the Annunciation is replaced by a rather equivocal scene with Mary and an angel in the guise of a young man. The result is twins and this provides the machinery of the plot. The elder, Jesus, is a good man who does not claim to be God. His younger and weaker twin brother, named Christ, has no such scruples. Jesus is passionate about calling all to repentance for the Kingdom of God is very close at hand. Christ is altogether more circumspect.

There is real pleasure in coming across stories from the Gospels told so refreshingly and well. That of the Prodigal Son would come first on my list. But there are then those stories, which although based on the Gospel account, deviate in some material way. This can both upset and let the hackles rise, until the note on the back cover is recalled: This is a Story. It is a story and, for a story to work, particular actions and motivations must be present. On a second reading and on reflection these deviations begin to shed light. Some are precious Gospel stories and so the deviations also jar deeply.

Peter’s confession at Caesarea Phillippi is met by a furious denial by Jesus, but, in the context of this story, this is in character. The Feeding of the Five Thousand in this story is about sharing. The parable of the wise and foolish virgins is given an intriguingly different twist. With others the precious elements are missing. The journey to Emmaus has none of the burning in the disciples’ hearts as the scriptures are revealed; Jesus is not recognised as he breaks bread. There is no Last Supper and so no washing of Peter’s feet. The Eucharist is introduced after the resurrection and then misunderstood.

For all the jarring, I found myself drawn yet more closely to Jesus of Nazareth and his goodness and honesty. Pullman has created vivid depiction of the man, even if many Christians would dispute his theology.

Does a fine tuned universe put pay to God?

I have written before that physicists have long argued that life exists only because the conditions are or were exactly right. I hadn't realised just how precisely right they had to be.

A wonderfully gifted Lecturer in Philosophy from Hull (see below) explained the issue quite brilliantly at the Drill Hall on Saturday. Just how was it that the conditions were just right? Was it by the design of some superior being. Was it by chance? Or was this universe one amongst perhaps an infinity and so was the one to have the right conditions. Ockham's Razor was the 'technique' used to choose between the explanations. It holds that the choice should be that which require the addition of the least new elements. So the plethora of universes wins.

We went on to talk of God.

If we reject the idea of 'God' behind the creation of the universe, is that an end to any idea of God?

We can still look at the world's great religions for moral guidance, for a framework of how life may be lived. Or do we now know it all? Has the secular world taken on all that is helpful and so can put forward its own moral framework. I have argued elsewhere that perhaps the Church has been too successful in enabling this. Perhaps we can look at Jesus, for example, and look to follow his teaching. We would need also to look at Jewish teaching to achieve a reasonably comprehensive framework. We could equally look to Islam, Buddhism and other faiths.

We could do this, but does the faith rather fall apart once the creator God is removed?

We can talk of a spiritual dimension, something removed from the measurable world, something that can neither be proved or disproved by science. Richard Dawkins might suggest that this world is none other than our own unconscious mind. Yet the Bible itself talks of the Kingdom of God being within. Can we conceive of God in us, rather than out there? If we can, can we also communicate such an idea and leave in place the Bible, for example? We can explain that it represents the thinking of man over millennia and our thinking has simply taken a good few steps further forward with the benefit of science.

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Daniel Came is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hull. He received his BA and MPhil degrees in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He has held a Junior Research Fellowship in Philosophy at Worcester College, Oxford and a College Lectureship in Philosophy at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

Fine-Tuning, Theism, and the Multiverse Hypothesis

Physicists have calculated that, if the laws and constants of physics had been even slightly different, the universe would have developed in such a way that life would have been impossible. This apparent “fine-tuning”, some say, is best explained by theism. Multiverse theories are typically offered as naturalistic rivals to theism. If there are vastly many universes which vary ¬perhaps randomly ¬in their relevant parameters, then it is not at all surprising that at least one universe is life-permitting.
In this talk, I evaluate the adequacy of the multiverse hypothesis relative to classical theism in explaining the fine-tuning of the universe.

Questioning the existence of God

Archbishop Justin Welby questioned the existence of God after the Paris attacks. Matthew Paris provided a helpful summary of traditional theology on God and evil

The more I think about this, the more important it becomes that the leader of our Church should admit to doubt. I find it hard to conceive that anyone seeking Christian truth for a good number of years can have no doubts. Archbishop Welby thus affirms seekers like me, and I value that.