Category: big questions

Is God a woman?

03/03/2019

Is God a she?

My daughter started studying at Durham University last week scene of the latest round of our culture’s gender war.

Not content with forcing the sacking of the assistant editor of Critique, the university’s philosophy journal for the transphobic hate crime of sharing an article[i] from the Spectator Magazine that said women don’t have penises,[ii] the Students Union have issued “pronoun badges” to all new students bearing the slogan, “My pronouns are:”[iii]. Then there’s a space for the student to fill in their preferred option: whether something traditional like she/her or he/him; or something more gender fluid like: they/them, e/em, per/per, ve/ver, xe/xem.

Lest you think this just affects a bunch of loony students, the same pressures are coming to our schools, where organisations like Stonewall are using equality legislation and anti-bullying campaigns to shift our understanding of gender away from traditional or “binary” religious or chromosome based definitions of male and female towards something “non-binary”, where gender can be as simple as what you declare yourself to be.

And as you’ve probably noticed, with this new thinking, comes new language. The new pronouns used by non-binary people, words like: zie, sie, ey, ve, tey and e will be brilliant for Scrabble, but we shouldn’t be blind to what these new words mean for us. As Big Brother put it in 1984, once

…you control the language, you control the argument”.

Someone else trying to control the language so that she can control the argument is Rachel Treweek, the Bishop of Gloucester. Back in September, she told the Sunday Telegraph she didn’t

…want young girls or young boys to hear us constantly refer to God as he”[iv].

Previously she has challenged the Church of England to stop referring to God as he, and to also use female pronouns[v]. But is she right to do this?  What does the Bible actually say about God’s gender? Is God a she?

Let’s start with the obvious. The God of the Bible is not a human being, but Spirit (Numbers 23:19, John 4:24). Therefore God doesn’t have chromosomes or any physical body at all. As Article One of the Church of England’s doctrinal basis (as found in the Book of Common Prayer) puts it, God is

without body, parts, passions.”

But despite this, God must have both a “maleness” and a “femaleness” to Him because the Bible speaks of humankind (both male and female) being made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).

So what is God’s gender? Well, the overwhelming majority of the pronouns and descriptions of God in the Bible are masculine. Paul’s letters refer to God as Father over forty times and use masculine pronouns throughout. Jesus, who knew a thing or two about God, speaks of God as Father sixty-five times in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and over one hundred times in the gospel of John. Most famously, Jesus said this is how you should pray:

Father, hallowed be your name…”

Father, here, doesn’t mean God is our biological father, instead, it’s a relationship term, an invitation into the eternal relationship of God the Father to God the Son; through the Father’s promise of adoption into his family, by trusting in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

But despite all the male pronouns and descriptions, there are also a number of female images of God in the Bible. Whilst at no point is God described as “she” or “her”, He is described as being like a woman in labour (Isaiah 42:14); a considerate, comforting mother (Isaiah 49:15, 66:13); a mother eagle (Deuteronomy 32:11-12), and a mother hen (Matthew 23:37). God’s wisdom is personified as a woman in the book of Proverbs, though we are later told that the male Jesus is the Wisdom of God (1Cor.1:24).

I haven’t added up the numbers but I’d be surprised if these female images of God amounted to more than 0.5% of the total gender-based references to God in the Bible, and so on weight of numbers alone, it’s pretty obvious that God presents himself as male in the Bible, albeit with some significant female characteristics.

However, a critic might reasonably ask to what extent the maleness of God is a consequence of the Bible being written by men in a male-dominated society? Perhaps men have obscured the truth about God by remaking Him in their own image? That question is of course as impossible to answer, as the equal but opposite charge: that when feminist theologians call God she, they are remaking God in their own image and therefore obscuring the truth about Him!

When it comes down to it, we each have to decide whether we’ll trust what the Bible reveals about God, or try to rewrite it to suit our own agenda. The 4th-century theologian Hilary of Poitiers put it like this,

For he is the best student who does not read his thoughts into the [Bible], but lets it reveal its own; who draws from it its sense, and does not import his own into it, nor force upon its words a meaning which he had determined was the right one before he opened its pages. Since then we are to discourse of the things of God, let us assume that God has full knowledge of himself, and bow with humble reverence to his words. For he whom we can only know through his own utterances is the fitting witness concerning himself.”[vi]

Or to put it another way, if God were a student at Durham University, then the Bible is his pronoun badge, and he’s written “He” “His” and “Father” all over it, and who are we to tell Him He’s wrong?

 

First published in the Bridge Magazine November 2018

 

 

[i] https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/08/is-it-a-crime-to-say-women-dont-have-penises/

[ii] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6192453/Student-editor-tweeted-women-dont-penises-fired-university.html

[iii] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/university-hands-out-pronoun-badges-13362943

[iv] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/16/church-england-should-avoid-calling-god-bishop-says/

[v] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/24/bishop-rachel-treweek-gods-not-a-he-or-a-she

[vi] De Trinitate (1.18)

What is the purpose of my life?

03/03/2019

Is there a purpose to my life?

I was a teenager when I first thought about whether my life had a purpose. I blame the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life for that. It promised so much in its opening song:

Why are we here? What’s life all about? Is God really real, or is there some doubt? Well, tonight, we’re going to sort it all out, For, tonight, it’s ‘The Meaning of Life’.”[i]

Yet an hour and a half of sketches later, all it delivered was,

Well, it’s nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people. Avoid eating fat. Read a good book every now and then. Get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

Really? Is that all there is to it?

I had a similar feeling about The Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy, in which the ultimate super-computer Deep Thought spends 7.5 million years trying to answer the question of life the universe and everything, before concluding that the answer is “42.” The problem it seems is we hadn’t properly understood the question.

So is there a purpose for our lives? Well if there is, it would be enormously helpful to know what it is, because, as the Ancient Roman senator Seneca put it,

When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind”.

So let’s think about if there is a purpose to life, and how we might know. Certainly, experience leads many people to think they have a purpose in life. Self-help books are full of techniques to discover your purpose or “true north” as the Americans like to call it. Interestingly some of those techniques tell you that you can choose for yourself what your true purpose is. Author Justin Gesso claims this is “hugely empowering”, an “awesome revelation.”[ii]

Yet it also begs the question: if I can choose my life purpose then I can also change it, and keep changing it: so which life purpose is the right one (if there is indeed a right one)? This is especially frustrating when you then go and talk to someone who claims that rather than choosing their purpose in life, their purpose in life seems to have chosen them!

Then at the same time, the newspapers are full of tragic stories about people who have lost all hope in life, who feel like they have no purpose. So what’s going on? How do we make sense of this? Well, it might seem like I’m arguing semantics here but it seems to me that some people are calling a purpose in life what would be better called a cause or a passion.

  • A PASSION as an intense desire or enthusiasm for something. So for example, (and please forgive the gender stereotyping) Samantha is passionate about netball. John is passionate about hiking. Passions like this are internal; they’re things we can choose because we can choose the causes we invest our time in.
  • A PURPOSE, in contrast, is The Reason for which something exists, and is by definition “external”. So a purpose can never be something we choose, instead, it’s something that some agent outside of us has chosen for us, and shaped us for. So for example, the purpose of Upton Bridge[iii] is to connect two banks of the River Severn. The bridge didn’t choose this purpose, instead, it was chosen for it by the people who created it. In the same way, we would never say that the purpose of Samantha is netball or the purpose of John is hiking. That’s just something they’ve chosen to do; it’s their cause, their passion, their reason to get out of bed in the morning.

What all this means is that once we define purpose as the reason something exists, then any attempt to talk about the purpose of our lives is, whether we realise it or not, a god claim. We’re implicitly stating that something bigger than us (god, fate, the universe, whatever) has a plan for our lives!

This, of course, means an atheist can never really claim their life has a purpose. They may well have passions and causes that motivate them to do extraordinary things, but to claim that an external force they don’t believe in, has a purpose for them, is bad atheism!

So where does this leave us?

First, it means that for all the same reasons you can’t prove the existence or otherwise of god using empirical means, you can’t prove you have a purpose in life.

Second, it means that if we are comfortable with the idea of god, we should also be comfortable with the idea of a purpose for our lives. At which point the question becomes which god, which purpose, and how we can know. More on that another time.

Finally, it leaves us with the problem of experience. Even though many people deny the existence of a god, they still feel a deep sense that they have a purpose in life. It gets labelled in various ways: fate, karma, destiny, providence, kismet, but I’d argue it’s something more. St Paul says,

we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10).

If that’s true, then our yearning for a purpose is really God’s way of getting us to re-examine our presumption that he doesn’t exist! Our longing for meaning implies that there is a giver of meaning, and should cause us to seek him out!

First published in the Bridge Magazine October 2018

 

[i] Cited from http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Meaning_of_Life/intro.htm

[ii] Cited from https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/7-ways-create-your-life-purpose.html

[iii] I’ve intentionally chosen an inanimate object here, as it’s a lot easier to be certain about it’s purpose. Had I chosen a human example, I could not have spoken with any certainty about his/her purpose as I’m not their creator!

Is God the Author of Evil?

03/03/2019

Did God Create Evil?

At our newly launched youth group (“The Deep End” – for young people in the yr5 to yr10 age range), one of the young people asked me a great question, “Did God create evil?”

Some people would answer the question “Yes.” After all:

  1. The Bible says God created the whole universe
  2. There is clearly good and evil in the universe
  3. So logically God created both good and evil.

That’s actually a pretty handy thing to be able to claim, because if God is the inventor of evil then he’s responsible for all my failings, and “I was born this way” becomes the perfect excuse for everything from burping in public to mass murder!

The thing is, the Bible says loads more about the problem of evil than just pinning everything on the creator. For starters, it tells us that God is good and that all his works are perfect and just. He is:

“a faithful God who does no wrong” (Deuteronomy 32:4).

So he can’t have created evil.

It also tells us that God’s original creation was completely good (that is, there was no evil in it):

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” – Genesis 1:31

And into that very good creation, God placed the first people, giving them the freedom of a beautiful garden with everything they needed for life, joy and family. But with that freedom came two responsibilities – one was to take care of creation (Genesis 2:15). The other was to obey God’s very simple rule about the garden – they could eat food from all the trees but one. Eat of that one, and they would surely die (Genesis 2:17).

And that second responsibility is the key to understanding the whole question of whether God created evil. By creating a rule that could be disobeyed, God created the possibility of rule-breaking, evil, or sin, as the Bible calls it. Understood this way, evil isn’t a supernatural force like it is in the horror movies and some religious traditions – which tend to portray evil as a ying-yang style balancing force to good. Instead in the Bible, evil is at heart, disobedience to God’s moral law. And tragically the people God placed in that wonderful garden broke his moral law (Genesis 3), and people have carried on in much the same vein ever since.

So God didn’t create evil. But there’s another question we need to ask: Did God do a proper risk assessment on the Garden of Eden? After all, if you create a world in which evil is possible, and put people who are capable of evil into it, don’t you have some responsibility for what happens? Does God have a duty of care?

I’m writing this on the first afternoon of the World Cup, and so I hope you’ll indulge me a footballing analogy…Back in October 1863, the Football Association pulled together the various strands of football to create a unified set of rules for Association Football. I mention this because 47 seconds into the first World Cup game, Russian winger Aleksandr Samedov was hacked to the ground by Saudi defender Omar Hawsawi. So who is responsible for what happened? Was it the Saudi footballer, or the Football Association? Like the referee, I hope you choose to blame the footballer! And it’s just the same with God and creation. Although he created a world where it is possible for us to do evil, God holds us responsible for what we do in that world. One day we can be sure that judgement will come.

But God does still have a duty of care. That’s why the main story arc of the Bible is all about how he responds to the mess we’ve made of his world. He makes a series of promises to put the world to rights and then comes in the person of Jesus to do it, by dying on the Cross to deal with the sins of the world.

But benefitting from God’s duty of care isn’t automatic. As we saw earlier, he created us to be morally responsible choosers, and his rescue plan involves a choice too: a choice to admit our part in the world’s mess and ask for the good gifts of forgiveness and life that Jesus offers through his death and resurrection. And if we’ll do that, something amazing happens: God takes responsibility for the evil we have done, and we’re set free.

So did God create evil? Did he create all the mess in the world? No, we did.

But through the Cross God ends up paying the price to fix it! And as any parent will tell you, that’s what you’ll do for your kids if you really love them!

First published in the Bridge Magazine July 2018

Do all religions lead to God?

01/06/2018

Do all religions lead to God?

The belief that all religions are merely different paths up the same mountain is something of a cultural norm today. It’s often taught in schools to undergird the so-called “British” values of tolerance and respect, things which are surely essential in a multicultural society. And yet the moment you pause to think about the statement, it’s utterly absurd.

For a start, how could anyone claim to know that all religions are merely different paths up the same mountain? To know that all the paths up the mountain lead to the top you’d have to have total knowledge of the mountain, which when you remember that the mountain is God, is an enormously arrogant thing to claim!

Next, there’s the problem of what you mean by “all religions”, does “all” really mean all?  For example, does “all religions” include the Mexican cult of Santa Muerte (St Death)? In 2008, drug gangs kidnapped rival cartel members and sacrificed them in a ritual honouring St Death.   Does a human sacrifice religion count as a legitimate route to the top of the mountain? Or what about some of our modern science-fiction religions – for example, Jedi, which only began when Star Wars came out in 1977, or L.Ron Hubbard’s Scientology movement? Hubbard was a science fiction writer in the 1940s and 1950s, and allegedly as a result of a bet with another author, invented a religion as a get rich quick scheme. Hubbard was reputedly worth $600million when he died, so it must have worked for him – but will it work for anyone else? Are these all legitimate routes up the mountain? And if they aren’t, why not, who gets to decide, and how do you apply for the job?

But perhaps the biggest problem with saying that all religions are merely different paths up the same mountain is the huge differences between the religions on important things like god, the nature of the universe, human beings, morality and salvation.

Let’s take three obvious examples:

  1. Christians believe there is one god. Hindus believe there are many gods. In what way is that the same?
  2. Jews believe in a personal, speaking god. Buddhists don’t believe in god at all. In what way is that the same?
  3. Islam, Judaism (in fact most of the big religions) teach that salvation (whatever they mean by that) comes about by human effort. Christianity teaches that no amount of human effort can ever earn salvation, instead, it’s a gracious gift from God offered through Jesus. In what way is that the same?

When you take the time to understand what the different religions believe, they can’t all be true because their beliefs are mutually exclusive. No matter how sincerely people believe they are right, there cannot be both multiple gods, only one god, and no god. In other words, some of the paths going up the mountain are leading nowhere!

The poet Steve Turner sums it up well in his tongue-in-cheek poem, Creed (which is well worth reading in full if you have the time).

We believe that all religions are basically the same,
at least the one that we read was.
They all believe in love and goodness.
They only differ on matters of
creation sin heaven hell God and salvation..

The differences between religions really matter. So much so that saying all religions lead to the same place is a bit like saying all trains lead to the same place.

As a child, I used to catch a train home from school, and one night my train wasn’t on its regular platform. I noticed, but two of my friends didn’t and boarded the express train to Scotland that the Fat Controller had unhelpfully parked on our regular platform.

Looking across at them through a grimy British Rail window, my first thought was, “It’s alright because all trains use platforms, rails, tickets, and seats – so they must lead to the same destination.” But then thankfully I realised that if they ever found out I hadn’t warned them, they’d probably never speak to me again, so I got off my train, got onto their train, and gave them the shocking news that all trains don’t go to the same destination and that if they wanted to get home tonight they really needed to get off!

I’d like to tell you that a surreal debate followed, in which my friends declared that all train destinations are just a matter of opinion and that they liked how their train made them feel, and who was I to declare it wrong for them? But thankfully my friends listened to the good news and followed me onto a train that would take them home!

All trains don’t lead to the same destination, and nor do all religions. Not if you actually bother to take onboard what they teach.

So what does all this mean for life in multicultural Britain?

Well, first it means we need a better basis for tolerating and respecting difference than arrogant and empty statements like “all religions are merely different paths up the mountain.”

Second, it means that when we hear people saying “all religions are merely different paths up the mountain” we should ask them why they believe that and demand to see the evidence.

And thirdly it should challenge us to ask the big question that our multicultural society is trying to tell us doesn’t matter: How can I know what is truly true?

First published in the Bridge Magazine, May 2018

 

Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

21/05/2018

Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

Someone recently told me he needed scientific proof before he could believe that Jesus rose from the dead. The problem is, it’s impossible to study past events under laboratory conditions!

Thankfully there are ways to probe the past: our legal system depends on it. No one demands scientific proof when it comes to a court case (though of course, we do use science to better understand some of the evidence). Instead, a jury uses the evidence to see which explanation (guilty or innocent) fits.

And we can do something similar with the resurrection. Listed below you’ll find seven common attempts to explain the first Easter. Let’s see which one best fits the evidence.

  1. Jesus rose from death.
  2. Jesus wasn’t dead, just unconscious, and exited the tomb when he recovered.
  3. Jesus’ disciples visited the wrong tomb.
  4. Jesus’ body was stolen by graverobbers.
  5. Jesus’ body was stolen by the Romans
  6. Jesus’ body was stolen by the disciples so they could claim Jesus had risen.
  7. Jesus’ disciples hallucinated the whole thing.

Let’s start by making sure Jesus was dead. In the hours leading up to his death, Jesus suffered an appalling beating leaving him significantly weakened. He was then crucified in classic Roman fashion (if you can stomach it, watch the Passion of the Christ to understand what he went through!) Wanting him dead before the Sabbath began at dusk, the Roman soldiers, who presumably knew a thing or two about killing, thrust a spear through his chest. From the description of the fluids flowing from the wound, it’s likely this perforated his lung, pericardium and heart. No reasonable doctor would suggest he was alive at this point.

But maybe his disciples went to the wrong tomb? The problem here is that the tomb wasn’t in an anonymous mass graveyard but a private burial cave in a garden belonging to a prominent citizen (Joseph of Arimathea). That’s a relatively easy thing to locate, which is why the Bible’s description of the reaction of Jesus’ followers to finding the tomb empty gives no hint that the location was in doubt.

So what about grave robbers? Let’s ignore the Romans guarding the tomb and the heavy stone sealing it and ask why anyone would want to rob the tomb? Jesus was known for his life of poverty, the only valuables in his tomb were the burial clothes – which his followers found left in the empty tomb. Why leave them and steal his body?

Maybe the Romans (or the Jewish authorities) took the body instead? They certainly had the opportunity, and perhaps a motive: to crush the Christian movement. But this begs an even bigger question: how much more damaging would it have been to produce the corpse when the disciples were running around Jerusalem telling people Jesus was alive?

So perhaps the disciples stole the body? For any resurrection conspiracy to work, you’d certainly have to get rid of Jesus’ body. The problem here is threefold.

  1. The gospels are pretty clear that the disciples weren’t expecting Jesus to rise from the dead.
  2. If it was a conspiracy, making a group of women your main eye-witnesses makes no sense at all: women’s testimony had no weight in Jewish law.
  3. If the conspirators spent the rest of their lives lying about Jesus rising from the dead, it’s astonishing that no one ever told the truth. Charles Colson – one of the Watergate conspirators – said:

I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one  was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and  they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re  telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years?  Absolutely impossible.

Having ruled out most of the alternatives, what evidence is there that Jesus rose from death? Two strands of evidence are particularly helpful.

First, we have multiple eye-witness accounts of people seeing the risen Jesus. St Paul tells us Jesus appeared to Peter, “and then to the Twelve.  After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living” (1Corinthians 15:5-6). “Still living” is an invitation for doubters to go and meet the 500 eye-witnesses who saw the risen Jesus and ask them about it!

Now you might respond by saying they were hallucinating? But the sightings of Jesus don’t fit any pattern of mass hallucination that modern psychology is aware of. There was no expectation that Jesus would rise, there’s no use of narcotics, and Jesus was seen in different places by different groups of people, who interacted with him, touched him and even ate with him.

My second strand of evidence supporting the resurrection is the remarkable transformation in the disciples. Jesus’ arrest and execution left them distraught, demoralised, and afraid. Yet six weeks later they’re standing on street corners and in the Temple fearlessly proclaiming that they have seen the risen Jesus – a message that shook Jerusalem to its core and which despite huge persecution, spread rapidly outwards through Judea and Samaria to the ends of the Earth: even rural Worcestershire.

Modern science first came up with the Big Bang theory because scientists looked at our rapidly expanding universe and concluded that something pretty remarkable (a big bang) had to have set everything in motion. It’s the same with Christianity. When you look at the rapid expansion of the early church it’s clear something remarkable happened to set everything in motion. Which of the explanations do you think best fits the evidence?

First published in the Bridge Magazine, April 2018

______

If you’d like to read more on arguments about the resurrection, Who Moved the Stone? By Frank Morison, a sceptic who set out to disprove the resurrection is a great place to start. Or catch the film Risen, starring Joseph Fiennes.

Does the Bible condone slavery?

21/05/2018

Does the Bible condone slavery?

Someone once asked me, “Doesn’t the Bible condone slavery?” He’d been reading some bits of the Bible (in the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Philemon) and couldn’t find anything saying slavery was wrong. He therefore concluded that the Bible condones slavery. Was he right?

Let’s start by defining what we mean by “slave.” Today, it makes us think of the horrific race-based “colonial slavery” that took place in the 17th-19th centuries on plantations in the Americas, and sometimes even closer to home: there are slaves mentioned in the baptism and burial records of the nearby village of Twyning!

However, the word had a more complex meaning in the ancient world. The Hebrew and Greek words translated as slave in modern Bibles can mean a colonial-type slave or a servant or a bondservant. A bondservant was typically someone who got into debt and had no alternative but to sell themselves into the service of a rich master for a period of time. In exchange, this master would clear their debt, pay them a wage, house them and feed them (and their family). Arguably that’s a better deal than you’d get from Wonga, and isn’t so far removed from the idea that Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester, proposed on Question Time recently: to pay off junior doctors’ student loans if they’d commit to working in Manchester for five years after they graduated!

So when we read the word “slave” in the Bible, we have look for clues in the surrounding verses to work out which of the three meanings the author meant. Here are a few examples:

  1. Joseph – (he of the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat) – is a classic colonial slave: assaulted by his brothers and sold to slave traders who sold him into the service of an Egyptian nobleman.
  2. Moses and the whole people of Israel in Egypt are also classic colonial slaves: cruelly treated, they have no hope of freedom.
  3. 3.The slaves held by the Israelites in Leviticus 25 (from v39 onwards) are most likely bonded servants, because the passage sets out how, if there was no help available from family, a debtor could sell himself into slavery to clear the debt.
  4. Onesimus – the slave who features in Paul’s letter to Philemon is most likely a bonded servant too (though there’s no way to know for certain).

What does the Bible think of these different types of slavery? Does it condemn or condone them? It can hardly be said to condone slavery when it condemns any trading activity involving slaves. Exodus 21:16 says

“Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.”

St Paul echoes this in the New Testament by including slave traders in a list of breakers of God’s moral law (1Timothy 1:9-10).

We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers,10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine

The Bible also condemns any abuse of power in a master-slave relationship – see for example Ephesians 6:9:

And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.

– and encourages slaves who have become Christians to seek freedom if they are able (1Corinthians 7:21).

Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so.

So the Bible doesn’t condone slavery, but nor does it go the whole hog and condemn it by commanding that all slaves be set free. The most plausible reason for this is political. It took Christian MP William Wilberforce decades of coalition-building and campaigning at the highest level of a relatively democratic government to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. The early Christians had none of his advantages – they were a tiny, powerless, persecuted sect living in an autocratic Empire that had slavery at every level of its life. Changing this was too big a task for such a small group of people; so instead they set about changing hearts and minds by caring for the sick, widows and orphans, all the while sharing the good news of Jesus Christ.

This doesn’t, however, excuse later generations of Christians who did have the power and influence to change things, and either didn’t use it, or took advantage of the Bible’s varied meaning of the word slave to continue to profit from slavery.

Thankfully there have always been those who vocally opposed slavery. For example, St Wulfstan, the 11th century Bishop who laid the foundations of Worcester Cathedral and Malvern Priory, was an outspoken mediaeval opponent of slavery. But it wasn’t until the Evangelical Awakening of the late 18th century that Christians really began to mobilise, leading to the abolition of slavery in first the British Empire and then the Americas.

Tragically that struggle continues today. The Christian charity International Justice Mission estimates that there are some 40 million modern slaves worldwide, and Christian charities across the world continue to be at the forefront of the battle to set them free.

If you would like to know more about the campaign to end modern slavery, visit www.ijmuk.org

First published in the Bridge Magazine, February 2018

“Virgin on the Ridiculous!” Was Jesus really born to a virgin?

16/01/2018

“Virgin on the Ridiculous!” Was Jesus really born to a virgin?

The idea that Jesus was born to a virgin mother is found in two of the Bible’s four accounts of Jesus’ life. The gospel of Luke tells the story from the perspective of Mary, a young teenage girl, who is visited by an angel saying,

Don’t be afraid Mary. You have found favour with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.”

Mary replies,

How will this be since I am a virgin?”

Matthew’s gospel gives us Joseph’s take on the story: how an angel visits him to talk him out of breaking his engagement to the pregnant Mary because

What is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”

Matthew then links it to a prophecy in the Old Testament book of Isaiah,

The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him ‘Immanuel’ – which means ‘God with us.’”

So why do people object to the idea of the Virgin Birth? Well let’s look at the main objections and try to address each in turn.

 

1)There’s no evidence.

This is the weakest objection to the Virgin Birth. For starters, we have the eye-witness testimony of the mother (recorded in Luke) and her future husband (recorded in Matthew). Luke made a comprehensive study of the early Christians, he met James, one of Mary’s other sons, and Joseph, the half-brother of Jesus, and he spent time in Jerusalem within Mary’s possible lifetime. He tells us many things about her that no other gospel writer does – the sort of things that might have come direct from her. By any historical standard, that’s good evidence.

 

2) Mary lied about it. She was just a young girl who got pregnant and made up the angel story to pacify her angry parents and fiancé.

Except it didn’t pacify them – Joseph wanted to cancel the engagement! If Mary was a liar, she could have invented a far more plausible lie: for example, she could have invented the sort of story that the Greek philosopher and opponent of Christianity Celsus made up 150 years later, telling everyone she’d been raped by a Roman soldier (Celsus gave him the very common Roman soldier name Pantera.)

 

3) Luke and Matthew copied pagan myths of Virgin Births to make Jesus seem impressive.

The problem with this objection is twofold. First, there aren’t any pagan Virgin Birth myths that sound anything like Jesus’ birth. There are stories of women who had sex with gods and produced children, but whilst that’s miraculous, that’s not a Virgin Birth. Historian Thomas Boslopper compared the Virgin Birth to all the Pagan stories and concludes,

The literature of the world is prolific with narratives of unusual births, but it contains no precise analogy to the Virgin Birth in Matthew and Luke. Jesus’ ‘Virgin Birth’ is not ‘pagan’” [i]

The second problem is that Matthew’s gospel was written to convince a Jewish audience that Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of the Jewish religion. So how could dressing Jesus up in a Pagan myth have persuaded them he was a good Jew?

 

4) The apostle Paul doesn’t mention it. Apart from Luke and  Matthew, the rest of the New Testament ignores the Virgin Birth.

This objection is an argument from silence. The rest of the New Testament doesn’t mention the Virgin Birth, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen – it just means they didn’t mention it.

Let’s change tack for our next objection and think of the scientific objection.

 

5) It’s biologically impossible. Science says you need a woman and a man for conception to occur. Therefore, Jesus’ origin must be miraculous, and this is impossible because miracles don’t happen.

The problem with this objection is that it’s conclusion (the virgin birth is miraculous and therefore impossible) is assumed in the initial assumption (that there is no God, or if there is a God but he doesn’t intervene in nature).

But what happens if we change our initial assumption to something a little more open-minded? If we allow the possibility that the all powerful creator God the Bible describes is real and that he intervenes in nature, then of course a Virgin Birth is possible!

 

6) Christians misunderstand what the Bible says.  The word translated “virgin” in the Old Testament prophet Isaiah (which is quoted by Matthew in his account) can also mean “young woman.”

It’s true that the word translated “virgin” can also mean young woman, but it’s also true that it’s never used of a young woman who isn’t a virgin.

However there’s a far bigger clue to the meaning of the word in what Isaiah says: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel”.

Now imagine your God’s PR company and you want to do a publicity stunt (a sign) to publicise the birth of God in human form (that’s what Immanuel means). Which would be the more memorable publicity stunt: a young woman giving birth to a son, or a virgin giving birth? Which would people still be talking about 2000 years later?

I once heard a scientist speaking on the radio critiquing the biology of the Virgin Birth. He said,

If such a thing were to happen it would be an event unique in human history.”

He said that as a way of dismissing it, but actually I think he makes my point rather well. The Virgin Birth is a unique, miraculous moment in history, a sign, pointing us to the significance of the baby born to an unmarried mum in a rundown stable in a backwards hill-country town in the middle of nowhere; God with us. May you enjoy discovering him this Christmas time!

If you’d like to read more about the Virgin Birth, historian and theologian NT Wright has written a good article here:

First published in the Bridge Magazine, December 2017

_______

[i] Boslooper, Thomas (1962), The Virgin Birth, Philadelphia: Westminster Press)., p162

Are Christians inconsistent about laws in the Old Testament?

16/01/2018

Are Christians inconsistent about laws in the Old Testament?

Sometimes Christians get accused of picking and choosing which Old Testament laws they want to obey.  For example, the Old Testament outlaws the eating of shellfish, and the wearing of mixed fabrics – yet many Christians today say it’s okay to ignore those laws, whilst at the same time insisting that we obey other parts of the Old Testament law. Surely this is inconsistent?

If you know the US TV series The West Wing you might remember an episode in which the US President challenges an obnoxious Christian radio host about her apparent inconsistency. First he baits her into quoting chapter and verse on some Old Testament laws she upholds. Then he says to her:

I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?

While thinking about that, can I ask another? My Chief of Staff Leo McGarry insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or is it okay to call the police?

Here’s one that’s really important ’cause we’ve got a lot of sports fans in this town: Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean. Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? …”[i]

Now it’s undeniable that Christians ignore some Old Testament laws while obeying others. Whilst some might do this out of ignorance, I want to suggest that actually there’s a really good reason why Christians should be inconsistent in their approach to the Old Testament law, and that reason is Jesus and the bigger story the Bible is telling.

To understand why, let’s think about the purposes of Old Testament laws. Broadly speaking they fall into three categories:

  1. Sacrificial laws which relate to the animal sacrifices offered in the Jewish religious system. The purpose of these sacrifices was to deal with sin.
  2. Ceremonial purity laws which include rules about clean and unclean foods and animals (the President pigskin laws!) Their purpose was to help people be ritually clean, ready to come into God’s presence in the temple, and also to keep Israel distinctive from the other nations.
  3. Moral laws which set out moral rights and wrongs. For example Leviticus 20, which among other things says that practices such as child sacrifice, incest, spiritualism and adultery are wrong.

However the Old Testament isn’t just a law book, it also tells the story of God’s relationship with his people. As we meet characters like Abraham, David, Esther and Ruth, we learn about God’s trustworthiness and his care for his people. We also see how impossible it is to keep God’s law perfectly. That’s why in the Old Testament, the heroes are also always villains!

Taken together these individual stories reveal a bigger story arc: the search for a descendant of Adam and Eve who will put the world to rights. He’s given various names, for example:

  • Serpent Crusher (Genesis 3:15);
  • a Prophet greater than Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15-19);
  • an Everlasting King (2Samuel 7:12-16);
  • and the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53).

But it wasn’t until nearly 500 years after the final words of the Old Testament were written that Jesus declared these prophecies were all about him (John 5:39). You can imagine what a shock it was. Such blasphemy! No wonder they crucified him! And if Jesus had stayed dead his words would have died with him. But he rose from the grave, and that’s why we take what he says about the Old Testament and what we do with its laws so seriously.

So what did Jesus do to the Old Testament Law? For starters, Jesus commits himself to all of it. He says,

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.” (Matthew 5:17)

But what does that word fulfill mean?

  1. The sacrificial laws find their fulfillment in Jesus’ death on the cross, Jesus became the ultimate sacrifice. Christians have no need to sacrifice sheep and goats because Jesus is the final sacrifice (Hebrews 10:10) “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29)
  2. The ritual purity laws also find their fulfillment at the Cross. No amount of eating the correct diet can makes us ritually clean before God, but asking for forgiveness through the cross makes us clean once and for all (1John 1:8-9). Jesus declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19) and the early church rejected ritual practices such as circumcision (1Corinthians 7:18).
  3. But what about the moral laws – the laws governing life and love and all our relationships? Jesus made them even more demanding! He said things like, “You’ve heard that it was said love your neighbour and hate your enemy, but I tell you love you enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” That’s the moral law of love dialled up to 11! No wonder we need the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

So are Christians inconsistent in their handling of Old Testament laws? Yes – but only if you take the Old Testament law books in isolation and ignore the purpose of the laws they contain. However if you read the Old Testament laws books in the context of the bigger redemption story revealed in the Bible, Christians are right to distinguish between different types of Old Testament law. In fact, to not distinguish would be to deny one of the central themes of Christian faith: that Jesus died as an atoning sacrifice for sin.

First published in the Bridge Magazine, November 2017

[i] The West Wing, series 2, episode 3, “The Midterms” quote cited from http://bernidymet.com/president-bartlets-theology-challenge-how-will-you-respond/

Does religion cause war?

16/01/2018

Doesn’t religion cause most of the conflict in the world?

The sooner all religions are gone, the sooner the world will be a peaceful place”

was how one angry caller responded to a phone-in on Radio 5 Live last week about the proportion of religious and non-religious people in our country.

We only have to think of ISIS in Syria, or to the sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland, to recognize that religion has some blood on its hands. But is the caller’s idea true more broadly? Eminent atheist Richard Dawkins certainly thinks so:

There’s no doubt that throughout history, religious faith has been a major motivator for war and for destruction.”[1]

Atheist author Sam Harris goes even further by calling religion,

the most prolific source of violence in our history”[2]

Now in their books, Dawkins and Harris are always very keen for us to only believe things for which there is sound evidence, so let’s examine the evidence to see if what Harris says is true: is religion really is the most prolific source of violence in our history?

In 2014 The Institute for Economics and Peace published “Peace and Religion” exploring the causes of the 35 armed conflicts that occurred during 2013. It concluded that

Religion did not stand as a single cause in any conflict”

and that religion played no role at all in 40% of the conflicts. Whilst religion was identified as the main cause of conflict in 14% of cases, something else was far more likely to be the main cause: opposition to a particular government or its economic, ideological, political or social system (65%).

But that was just 2013, surely the picture is different if we take a longer-term study? In 2004 Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod published a book every nerdy schoolboy would want on his shelf: the Encyclopaedia of Wars. It covers every major war, rebellion and revolution from the last 5,500 years.  Of the 1,763 wars analysed, just 7% (123) were categorized as having religion as their main cause. Interestingly more than half of the 7% were related to just one religion: Islam.

You might think therefore that with the rise of Al-Qaeda and Isis since 2004, the proportion of conflicts having religion as their main cause is on the rise. However Gordon Martel’s 2012 The Encyclopaedia of War, which covers similar ground to Phillip and Axelrod but also includes the period up to 2011, identifies religion as the cause in only 6% of wars.[4]

In his book River out of Eden, Richard Dawkins said[5],

Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.”

And the evidence tells us that the claim religion is “the most prolific source of violence in our history” is a myth!

But if it isn’t religion that causes war, what does? All the evidence suggests that the main cause of conflict is what American political scientist Randolph Rummel called “Death by government” – a phrase he coined  to describe the biggest single cause of death in the 20th century – the 170 million men, women and children “shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed or killed in any other of a myriad of ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners.”[6]

When you break down Rummel’s numbers it’s easy to see who lies behind most of the deaths in the 20th century, but it’s impossible to tell how much religion (or its absence, in the majority of these cases) contributed to this death toll.

 Religious beliefDeaths
Stalin (Russia)Atheist42,672,000
Lenin (Russia)Atheist4,017,000
Mao Zedong (China)Atheist37.828,000
Chian Kai-Shek (China)Confuscianism (mixed with Christianity)10,214,000
Hideki Tojo (Japan)Emperor Worship3,990,000
Pol Pot (Cambodia)Atheist (mixed with Buddhism)2,397,000
Adolf Hitler (Germany)Most likely a pantheist, though his religious statements are so contradictory that it is hard to pin him down.20,946,000

 

Perhaps we should blame Communism instead? Certainly a lot of the 20th Century’s “Death by Government” can be linked to Communism. But what of the millions who died in the 19th century before Marx and Lenin appeared on the scene? We can’t hang their deaths on Communism.

The fact is, every century, every period of history, has an -ism: Imperialism, Communism, Capitalism, Atheism, Islamism, Christianism – and it isn’t the -ism that causes the conflict in that period. Conflict is caused by giving unchecked access to power to leaders willing to kill to impose their -ism. As Theologian David Bentley Hart puts it,

-isms are variables, but killing is a human constant.”[7]

Which brings us to the heart of the problem – which is the problem of the human heart. If my Radio 5 Live caller really cares about making the world a more peaceful place, it’s not religion that needs eliminating, but the problems of the human heart.  As Jesus said,

it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”” (Mark 7:21-23)

And what offers the best solution to the problem of the human heart? Atheism or Religion? Well my money is on Jesus!

First published in the Bridge Magazine, October 2017

 

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfYrNz3zhno

[2] Harris, Sam, The End of Faith, page 27

[4] https://www.str.org/blog/is-religion-the-cause-of-most-wars#.Wa__cMiGOUk

[5] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

[6] Rummel, RJ, Death by Government, p9

[7] Bentley Hard, David, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

 

Can we trust the Bible #3: Is the Bible full of contradictions?

07/09/2017

Does the Bible contradict itself?

We all love to catch a politician contradicting themselves – but what about the Bible? Does it contradict itself, as you’ll sometimes hear people say, and if that’s the case, how can we trust anything it says?

Personally when people say “The Bible is full of contradictions” to me, I like to ask them which contradiction they have in mind – because often they don’t actually know of any – they just heard or read it somewhere.

But when they do name a contradiction, that’s when the fun starts, because as someone who is committed to the trustworthiness of the Bible, contradiction is a big issue to me!

Thankfully most of the possible contradictions people identify fall into one of five categories and turn out not to be contradiction at all. Let’s take a look at them. The first is:

1) The Typo.

The Old Testament book 2Chronicles (36:9) says Jehoiachin became king of Judah when he was 8 years old. But the other account we have of his reign, in 2Kings (24:8) says he was 18. Which is true?

This contradiction is likely to be a result of what we call “scribal error.” That is – at some point an error crept into the copying process of either 2Chronicles or 2Kings. We looked at these “errors” in the article about whether the Bible we have today has changed since it was originally written.

Broadly speaking we said: No – the Bible has not changed – certainly not in any of its major details or doctrines. But occasionally it’s hard to deny a discrepancy has crept in, and most good modern translations highlight them.

Another category of contradiction is:

2) Intentional

Proverbs 26.4-5, says,

Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.”

That seems to suggest that wise old King Solomon was so dumb that he put two contradictory proverbs next to each other. But far more likely is that he’s trying to teach us something about how to use his proverbs. You see proverbs never pretend to be one-size fits all solutions. True wisdom is knowing which one works when!

These “intentional contradictions” raise an important issue: that we can’t call something in the Bible a contradiction, until we’ve properly understood the type of literature we’re reading. So for example, we don’t read the erotic love poetry of Song of Solomon in the same way we read the Nativity Story (and we certainly wouldn’t want to get them muddled up in a school assembly!)

 

Here’s another kind of contradiction:

3) Ignoring the bigger story!

In the Old Testament, sin is forgiven by offering animal sacrifice. In the New Testament, sin is forgiven by the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. Which is right?

Answer: Both – but at different times in the bigger story of God’s dealing with his people! Some contradictions only exist because we haven’t thought about how they fit into the bigger story – the unifying plot that runs all through the Bible – from the opening chapters of Genesis to the final chapters of Revelation with the death and resurrection of Jesus as the hinge-point.

 

A related type of contradiction is:

4) Failure to understand the context

This isn’t so much a failure to grasp the bigger story, as a failure to grasp the more immediate story. So for example, Ecclesiastes 7:29 says,

God made man upright”

whereas Psalm 51:5 says,

Behold I was brought forth in iniquity.”

That looks like a contradiction, until you explore the context of the two verses. In the first the writer is talking about Adam and Eve and God’s original, perfect creation. In the second, the writer is talking about his own sinfulness. And because the two verses are speaking of something utterly different, they are not in contradiction.

 

A final type of contradiction is caused by:

5) Misinterpretation.

For example, when Jesus entered Jerusalem, Matthew 21:7 says he had two donkeys, but Mark 11:7 says he had one. Surely this is a contradiction.

At face value, it does look one – though it could just be a typo. But what’s more likely is that we’re misinterpreting the words to see contradiction where there is none. For example, are these two statements contradictory:

At John’s funeral we sang Abide with Me”,

and,

We sang Abide with me and The Lord’s my Shepherd at John’s funeral”?

No – they just emphasise different things – and most likely that Matthew and Mark are doing something similar.

So, is the Bible full of contradictions? No! Scholars have spent years analysing them, and most of them can be attributed to one of these five broad types.

If you’ve got a contradiction in mind that’s really bugging you, why not email me at barry@hopechurchfamily.org and let’s see if we can’t find a way though it!

To find out more:

First published in the Bridge Magazine, May 2017

 

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