Grace

I want to talk a bit about grace, because I think a lot of the time I don't really get it. From a Christian point of view, we have plenty of songs which major on grace ("Amazing grace", "Wonderful grace", "Grace, grace, grace", "By grace alone somehow I stand"), we have churches (Grace Baptist, Grace Community ... and so on), and of course as believers in the Protestant tradition, we follow Luther and the reformers and the apostle Paul in asserting that we are saved by grace alone. But I think we end up a bit muddled after that. What does it actually mean? What am I supposed to do with it? How should I live as a result? I think a lot of that may be because when we think about it, we tend to focus on ourselves. What happens when instead we start from God?

What does grace mean to the giver?

I guess the point about grace is that it starts from love. This is something that is open to us to experience as human beings. The trouble is, the language of love is blurred today; we tend to think of it as being transactional - you do something for me, I do something for you. This idea of relationships is described in Ecclesiastes - not in an approving way, but as part of what life looks like "under the sun" - if you take God out of the equation. "Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken." As though the whole point of relationships is to make you stronger, a kind of evolutionary strategy.

But that's not what love is. Love makes you weaker.  Or perhaps slightly more accurately, love has a cost. You give yourself for the other person. For example, parents sacrifice their comfort, wealth, and sleep to care for children. For all the jokes about what we expect our children to do when we need to be cared for, both the parents and the children know that there's nothing the child is ever going to be able to do which will make up for what their parents have done for them. Other relationships are like that as well - although it may be the case that both parties in a relationship sacrifice themselves within it.

I think that's how we need to understand how God is towards us. He created us, he loves us - not in a way that he is ever going to get anything back from. In fact, in the same way that there's nothing a child can really do to give anything back to their parents, there is absolutely nothing we can give back to God - because it was he who gave it to us in the first place. There's more - because we have "sinned", rebelled against God, he actually needs to come and rescue us. The price of this, in Christian terms, is massive - God, in the person of Jesus, comes and gives up his life to save us from the consequences of our sin. In the same way that a parent would do anything, give anything for their children, or a lover would do anything, give anything for his or her beloved, God has done everything and given everything to save us.

But the significant question is, why? What does he get out of it? Is it some kind of power trip to get people to worship him? Well, if you are the creator of the universe and so on, you don't need to surrender yourself to achieve this. In the same way as the pagan kings in the Bible could simply pass a law commanding everyone to bow down to them, and couple it with a death sentence for those people who didn't, there's no reason that God could not have done that. "Worship me - and if you don't, you'll face my judgement." If you accept that he is the creator of the universe, then it's hard to say that this is an unreasonable position to take.

But he doesn't.

Instead he gives us everything, eventually even himself. He knows that as he gives us this, we have done nothing to deserve it, and there's nothing we can do to repay it. So why does he? The answer is, because he loves us. "I know you don't deserve it. I know you can't repay it. But I love you - so I am pouring this out upon you..."

How does one react to this? Remember, nothing you can give back will ever repay what you have been given - and that's not what God expects - in the same way that we don't tot up the debt our children have for us and present them with a bill, and we don't keep a kind of ledger of the good things and bad things that our lover does for us if we truly love them - we just give, because it's what we want to do. What do you want from someone you have poured out your grace on, out of love? I would suggest that you just want them to value it, to be thankful for it, to recognise it. You want don't want them to do anything, you just want to know that they understand what you have done for them, and value it.

Now, what happens if you don't value what someone has done for you? You can imagine a situation where children are ungrateful for what their parents have done - they don't appreciate it, or mock it, or whatever. Or no matter what a lover does, his or her beloved is indifferent and unmoved by it. Eventually, the heart of the person pouring out their grace will be broken, they will stop giving. Eventually, in a sense, this also becomes an act of grace - the final one - the child does not want the embarrassment of their parents showing their love; the way the lover pours out grace on the beloved when the beloved is indifferent is just awkward. Better in those circumstances for the grace to cease, to allow distance between the two parties. The parent, the lover has not stopped loving, but unrequited love ultimately goes nowhere. 

So what should grace mean to us?

I suppose we need to grasp the nature and meaning of grace, in the first place. God's grace to us means that there is nothing we can give back - for our life, for our salvation. Anything we have to offer God is what he has already given us - it's his already. And he's not looking for you to "give anything back" to him. Or "give anything" to him at all. He simply wants you to understand and value what he's given you.

Again, it helps to think about this in terms of human relationships. What would the beloved do if the lover pours out grace upon them? They would simply love back. They would recognise how much they have been given, and be simply devoted in return. They don't need to do anything - the lover doesn't give a list of rules that need to be obeyed in return for their love - because they are simply pouring out their love. But even so, it is easy to see that there are ways of behaving in the light of that love which aren't an appropriate response to it. Parents don't approach their relationship with their children as a kind of quid pro quo thing - but everybody knows how awkward it is to see children who are ungrateful, who take what their parents give them for granted.

This imagery does exist in the Bible in more concrete form (eg. the book of Hosea) as well as in discussion about salvation by grace, and what the law means for people who have been saved. It's wrestled out in the New Testament as well - how are we supposed to live? What are we supposed to do? We are not called to live under the law, but that doesn't mean that what we do doesn't matter. There is a picture of what it is like when it goes wrong in both brothers in the story of the Prodigal Son - the younger brother takes for granted what his father has done for him - but the older brother is clearly resentful of his father as well - the same grace has been poured out on both of them, but the older brother talks about the fact that he has been "slaving" for him and "never disobeyed [his] orders" - this isn't the language of someone responding to love.

The image of the older brother was arguably the main point of the parable, addressed to the target audience - the Pharisees, who resented the fact that Jesus was drawing "sinners" back to God. Their lives had been based on keeping the rules, on proving they were good enough for God. But that was not how God had ever brought people to himself - he had always given salvation to his people. It's hard for those of us from a religious background to hold onto the fact that it's nothing that we have done that saves us - we tend to think, like the Pharisees, that we are pretty good - and lose sight of the fact that God has simply poured out his grace upon us because he loves us, even though there was nothing we could give to him. That's what we need to be holding onto.

This post is just musing; if there are theological errors, they are all mine.

"The Independent" rattles a cage

Now don't get me wrong. I like "The Independent" If I had my choice of daily newspapers in the UK, that would be the one. Yes, it is radically philosophically different from me - it is pretty humanist, and I am a Christian. But for the most part, I value its approach.

Not universally, though. This commentary was, in my opinion, a misguided and misinformed contribution to the new-religious/new-atheist "culture wars". There were some things that I agreed with - yes, faith schools do tend to pick up highly motivated children from wealthy families. Yes, I would agree with Hari and Dawkins that there are no "Christian children" or "Muslim children" (though I think that approvingly citing Dawkins in any context in a debate about the rightness or wrongness of religion shows the writer's presuppositions). But deep down, I think Mr Hari needs a hug - he evidently hasn't been able to deal with some things that scarred his childhood.

Irrespective of what the child thinks or believes, they are shepherded into a hall, silenced, and forced to pray - or pretend to.

Well, I have two children at a state comprehensive school in Surrey, one of the most conservative parts of the country. They simply don't have an act of collective worship every day. Where they do have assemblies, they don't generally have a religious dimension. But forget the fact that this doesn't reflect what is happening today - except in the paranoid fantasies of the new atheists who imagine the arrival of a theocracy next week. I finished O-levels in 1984. By the time I left (again, a state comprehensive), we had stopped singing hymns in assemblies, and any prayers were pretty perfunctory. Again, this was not in a radically left-wing part of Inner London, but in a middle class commuter town in Sussex. A fair number of assemblies had no religious content whatsoever, and they certainly didn't take place daily. I find it hard to believe that Christendom has managed to extend its grasp on the education system at all in the intervening years.

scientist Gregory S Paul

Who is Gregory S Paul, and why haven't I heard of him? I did a little googling. Here's some background on him. And here's some more. Here's the executive summary: Paul's research on religion and society has been debunked. Hari should not be quoting it, let alone leaning on it.

Very few people are, as adults, persuaded of the idea that (say) a Messiah was born to a virgin... You can usually only persuade people of this when they are very young.... if you watch children being taught about religion, you will see most of them instinctively laugh and ask perfectly sensible sceptical questions that are swatted away

So, Mr Hari - are children instinctively sceptical, unlike adults? Or are they easy to persuade, unlike adults? How about you make a decision about which way you want to play this before you write the article?

There is a real debate to be had about the role of religion in public life. But poorly informed, badly researched and unbalanced articles like this one don't contribute to it.

The problem of miracles ...

... is one that is entirely a consequence of presuppositions.

Let's define a miracle first of all as an event which lies outside the bounds of normal cause and effect. This isn't something which is just a little improbable - somebody with cancer going into remission, for example, or somebody winning the lottery. It is something which is so improbable as to be considered impossible by any sensible person - for example, the sun standing still, or somebody who has been dead for three days coming back to life, or feeding 5000 and more people from a child's packed lunch. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who pointed out that had the sun genuinely stopped moving in the sky, everybody on the planet would have slid across the surface for a thousand miles or so. In scientific terms, then, these miracles are preposterous.

Traditionally, alternative explanations are found, and the most hard-boiled miracles - the ones where it really becomes impossible to explain the narrative in terms of anything else - end up being discounted as myth. Why is that? Because such events lie outside our concept of how cause and effect work - we don't see how that can have been brought about. What has happened is that we have asserted, in effect, that all events must be confined to material cause and effect. Miracles don't happen, basically, because miracles don't happen.

Incidentally, a kind of reverse process happens for some aspects of myth. I remember in secondary school, some aspects of the account of Jason's travels in the Argo sound scientifically preposterous. But set against the background of the explosion of Santorini, all of a sudden some of the events become somewhat more explicable. That's another post, though ....

If you don't believe in God, or you believe in a God who is constrained to act in accordance with the laws of the universe, or you believe in a God who is detached from the universe, then it's inevitable that you will end up having to find an alternative explanation for miracles. But from a Christian point of view, there is no such problem. In Christian epistemological terms, the universe is God's universe. He created it; he has the ability to define the nature of reality. If he chooses to make the sun stand still over Gibeon - to suspend the laws of nature for some period of time, in one locality - then he can do that. The fact that there is no scientific way of explaining how it happened and no evidence for it is neither here nor there. That doesn't mean it didn't take place - simply that our scientific framework gives us no ability to determine how it took place.

Of course, this itself will rankle with people brought up on anything close to a materialistic worldview. "If we can't explain it, and there is no evidence for it, then how can we know it happened?" The thing is that materialism doesn't provide a worldview for explaining everything we see anyway. Aside from the fact that we can't really escape definitively from the solipsistic perspective that everything is in fact a dream, we then have to wrestle with the fact that materialism doesn't actually provide anything like a proper explanation of why there should be anything rather than nothing. In other words, rejecting accounts of miracles because they aren't consistent with a materialistic explanation of an event begs the issue that materialism fails to provide an adequate explanation of phenomena which are observed, and which we are unable to reject.

This is, I think, the heart of one of Berlinski's arguments against "atheism and its scientific pretentions" in "The Devil's Delusion".

Sharia law in the UK?

The Archbishop of Canterbury has stirred up the biggest religious controversy in the UK for a long time. From the BBC News website:

Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.

He says Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty"....

... Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said "there's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts - I think that's a bit of a danger".

Dr Williams is a thoughtful person, and I imagine that this proposal is because he sees religious and ethnic groups regarding themselves as culturally isolated from society. Unsurprisingly, this has led to vocal objections from people in society who already think that the cultural isolation of different ethnic and religious groups has gone far enough, and what is needed is greater integration.

I share the concern that people who have chosen to make their home here don't feel as though UK culture is relevant for them, and as a Christian, I also feel that the values of society are increasingly adrift from those values that I would regard as ideal. However, I don't think that the correct answer is to allow them - or me - to opt out of society. In fact, I am told in the Bible that I should expect to feel like a stranger in a foreign country - I'm not supposed to feel that I belong here.

What else does the Bible have to say about this? The teaching to Christians in the book of Romans is:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

This certainly wasn't written in an era where the authorities shared the values of the Christians. The Roman emperor was regarded as a God, and Christian monotheism led to a direct clash between them and the authorities. The first day of the week was the day when Christians met - but they didn't have a special holiday at this stage: Christians would gather at dawn or after dark, since they had no specific entitlement to a day off. And Christians at this stage weren't in positions of authority - they had no way of securing any sort of privilege. So instructing Christians that it was right for them to submit to authorities was not an easy teaching for them to accept.

Jesus' attitude was the same. The nation of Israel was under occupation. When challenged by Jews as to whether it was appropriate, in these circumstances, to pay taxes to the occupying nation, Jesus said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God what is God's." On another occasion, he went even further. One of the Roman laws was that Roman soldiers were entitled to demand that locals carry their equipment for one mile. Jesus said, "If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles."

My understanding is that this doesn't mean that you do what "the authorities" say, right or wrong. Your allegiance to God does override your obedience to "the authorities". But submitting to the authorities does mean that if your conscience leads you to disobey the authorities, you accept that they have the right to punish. This has been the attitude of Christians where there has been a clash with the authorities on many occasions since the New Testament era. For example, in the civil disobedience led by Martin Luther King, the protesters sought to behave in a way that was above reproach, but they accepted the authority of the state where their actions had led them to break the law. In the communist era behind the Iron Curtain, Christians were not prepared to obey the state and cease meeting together - or even only meet in a state-approved way - and this led to many Christians being imprisoned for their faith.

At the moment, UK law contains a great deal of religious tolerance. People of many different religions are allowed freedom of practice, and there are few points at which religious practice is constrained by national law. Whilst there is a danger when people feel that society has little to do with them, I think it is considerably more dangerous to allow cultural loyalty to transcend - not what I would consider "state loyalty" (as Williams put it) - but the order of the state, particularly in liberal democracies, where such order is effectively a social contract. You don't have to be loyal to the state to accept its authority. If you feel so strongly that the laws of the state clash with your conscience, you always have the option to move to somewhere more congenial to your beliefs.

Another issue, of course, is where lines are drawn. It is all very well to grant privileges to Islamic religious law - but why just Islamic law? Already the sensitivities of Hindus have been disturbed by the killing of a cow in Hertfordshire - surely this is a classic example of a case where religious sensitivities ought to be considered alongside state law? But why draw the line at the traditional religions? Isn't that discriminating against those people in non-traditional religions? My suspicion is that this sort of precedent will just lead to the breakdown of any sort of coherence in society, and any real regard for the structures of civil society. It is inevitable that the dominant culture will end up in a privileged position - I can't see that societies can work in any other way, and this is the case around the world. What is most important in a liberal society is that those cultures that aren't dominant are allowed the freedom to express themselves, where possible. This doesn't mean that the whole concept of society is undermined, with everybody doing their own thing. It does mean that there is a definite national or societal identity, and this is borne in mind as people of different cultures adopt that nation or society.

"Seize the day..."

... the ethos of the Dead Poets' Society - "to suck out all the marrow of life." Is this a Christian attitude?

Romans 8:6 says (ESV):

To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

Note that "flesh" here doesn't mean sex, but about things that are bound up with this world.

John Keating was right, in a sense - far too many people just drift through life, and we don't want to waste time - we have to be good stewards of our time as with everything else. But it's not for the reasons that he gives - that is, it's not because in 100 years' time we will be food for worms. From a Christian point of view, that's not how we see things. If our minds are set upon life and peace, then we are conscious of the fact that the day is coming when we will live for ever, and we will perhaps have the opportunity to do things that we can't even conceive of now!

So Keating's formulation of "seize the day" isn't the Christian perspective. Our minds aren't set on "death" - we don't seize the day because we will be dead tomorrow - because from a Christian point of view "to die is gain". Instead, our lives are set upon life and peace - our motivation is the fact that God has given us these things through his grace, and we are to use well what he has given us.

Scientific American interchange

The debate between non-theistic and theistic beliefs shows no sign of dying down. A couple of letters in this month's SciAm worthy of comment. Here's the first:

You are too generous to religion. Science disproves fundamental tenets of every major religious system, from creation stories to miracles to visions of the afterlife, and after throwing these out there is nothing left beyond a nebulous "religious feeling" and some moral principles, which are largely common sense to begin with.

If this counts as "religion", then perhaps it can coexist with science, but those who profess faith both in science and in one of the established religions make a mockery of both.

Will Nelson, Tucson AZ

This letter is sloppily worded. Science doesn't "disprove" miracles. Perhaps Nelson means that, under controlled conditions, miracles aren't observed to happen. But this doesn't prove that they haven't happened.

Perhaps, instead, he means that miracles are incompatible with philosophical naturalism - PN is unable to accommodate an event that is not explicable by naturalistic processes. But then it is not valid to simply equate philosophical naturalism with science - as has been pointed out many times, modern science was established by people who didn't have a philosophically naturalistic worldview, and yet this didn't invalidate their science. This line of argument would be more credible if a proof for the soundness of philosophical naturalism could be presented - but all we are really offered is a utilitarian, "It seems to work". Since there are other worldviews that are just as sound as philosophical naturalism which don't rule out the possibility of miracles, and within which science can just as well be carried out, the bald assertion that "science disproves ... miracles" is simply false.

If there were nothing left beyond "religious feelings" then I would be happy to agree with what Nelson says - but this has not been demonstrated. Incidentally, you would be right to conclude from this that I am not happy with faith being a kind of post-modern "upper-story" (see Schaeffer - here's a good place to start) phenomenon.

Nelson's use of the phrase "faith ... in science" is telling. It is a "worldviewish" term - one which suggests that Nelson is really talking about philosophical naturalism ("scientism") rather than the scientific method. Also, he sets "faith in science" and "faith in established religion" against each other - which highlights the fact that, if he thinks that belief in established religion is a fundamentally irrational act, then he thinks the same of belief in science.

Debunking myths

Sam Harris, an American author of some renown, rather in the Dawkins mould, writes in the L.A. Times concerning ten myths about atheism that he feels need debunking.

The debunking has to wait, however, since his article fails to do this. Joy, at Telic Thoughts, draws attention to his lack of logic here and here.

Favourite U2 tracks

I'm far too keen on U2. I have just started using last.fm in an attempt to broaden my interests in music. For anybody who is as interested in U2's music as I am, here's a list of my favourite moments from their discography.

10. Acrobat (Achtung Baby)
And I'd join the movement
if there was one I could believe in.
Yeah, I'd break bread and wine
if there was a church I could receive in.
Disturbing first choice from a Christian band, I know - but this song is moving because of its incredible anguish. Achtung Baby dated, I think, from the time when Edge was going through a painful divorce, and many of the lyrics on the album have pain and betrayal as a side-tone.

9. 40 (Under a Blood Red Sky)
This is a staple of U2's live performances, and I suspect this song has had more influence on modern Christian music than almost anything else. Well, maybe not. But it's a bit more interesting than "this is one of the all-time best Christian rock songs."

8. Walk On (All That You Can't Leave Behind)
You're packing a suitcase for a place
None of us has been
Somewhere that has to be believed in
To be seen
Dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, but the first of many in this list that is more broadly full of eschatological longing.

7. Kite (All That You Can't Leave Behind)
In addition to the impact of breaking relationships, U2 have explored the loss of parents (Kite, Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, Mofo), the permanence of relationships (A Man and a Woman), the growing-up of children (The Original of the Species). Somewhat more interesting than the typical "Boy-being meets girl-being under a moon which then explodes for no adequately explored reason". And also a longer lasting accompaniment to the average person's life.

The first time I heard Kite, I thought to myself: "Strange song. Who is Bono singing about?" It was finding out that kicked off the latest round of obsession with what U2 do.

6. Until the End of the World (Achtung Baby)
Judas Iscariot singing about Jesus, apparently. Another one of the eight or so fantastic and painful tracks on this album.

5. Vertigo (Live/Vertigo 2005)
The single and album versions were pretty good. But something happens when U2 get on stage - they just step up a gear. At least on the DVD's. Or maybe it was the direction. You'd have to ask somebody who was there. But this just rocks....

4. Yahweh (Acoustic live version/Vertigo 2005)
I've blogged about this song elsewhere. Again, the album version is okay - but in this stripped down version with Edge playing an acoustic guitar and a naive keyboard from Larry, this makes an amazing prayer/benediction at the end of the concert.

3. Where the Streets Have No Name (Rattle and Hum)
... where they switch to colour, and then turn on all the lights. This was the song that U2 turned down an offer of millions of pounds for the rights to it - I think from Apple - because it was so special to them and to the fans. I have to say that, whilst the African flags and the introduction to the One campaign in 2005 were good with this song, they weren't the same experience as the gigs where all the lights go on.

2. The Fly (Achtung Baby or Live)
Every artist is a cannibal,
Every poet is a thief,
All kill their inspiration
and sing about their grief.
... as evidenced by the choice of subject matter in the rest of the discography! Fantastic live.

1. Beautiful Day (All That You Can't Leave Behind)
See the bird with the leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colours came out
This is a most sublime moment. I would be hard-pushed to choose between either the 2001 live, the 2005 live, the Charles de Gaulle, or the Dublin Rooftop video for this song. (Yes, I really must be a bit obsessive, I guess)

Just to point out that NOT on this list are Pride (In the Name of Love), One, Sunday Bloody Sunday or I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. All of them worthy, but relatively dull (though I noticed for the first time that "Free at last!" in Pride references MLK directly this week). And definitely not "Mysterious Ways", which is probably one of my least favourite of their songs.