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.

Kindness

This single word was used by the Dalai Lama to name his religion, in response to a question by Duke of Edinburgh.

The sermon by Hugh Jones at St Nicholas Newport Lincoln on 24 January explored such fundamental questions in the context of the week of prayer for Christian unity and the very obvious differences within the Anglican Communion. I took away three key tenets of Christianity: a commitment to truth, an acceptance of difference, but above all a total dedication to human wellbeing

As I knelt for Communion, I felt a deep affinity for those many refugees I encountered in Lesvos. We didn't break bread there, we don't follow the same religion, be we are one, members together of humankind. Perhaps that is the ultimate primacy.

Is there then a place for religion? For many of those I met on Lesvos, it might be a commitment to the Prophet. For me it is a continual listening to/searching for the voice hidden in history of Jesus of Nazareth.