The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits

[I've struggled for a long time with my relationship with the Bible. It has been a rich source of insight and spiritual nourishment to me, but also at times, a source of deep doubt and confusion. My intention in this series is to share a little of how that relationship has developed over time. If you're a Christian and you're trying to work out your own approach to the Bible then it won't give you all the answers, but it may give you some questions and insights that could help you along the way. If you're not a believer, but you're interested in the Christian faith - or in Christians in particular - then it may give you a little insight into how some of us tick!]

[The Bible and Me Part I - Beginning to Question]
[The Bible and Me Part II - Creation]
[The Bible and Me Part III - Inerrancy]
[The Bible and Me Part IV - Scripture vs Tradition]
[The Bible and Me Part V - Job]

I've tried to make clear in my previous posts that I don't believe the Bible is inerrant, but I also do believe that it's extremely important to the Christian faith. Without it of course, there's a very good chance the Christian faith would not even exist.

I also don't believe that the Bible has the ultimate authority over our (Christian) lives. I believe that Christians are called to submit to God, not to a collection of ancient manuscripts! Having said that though, discerning God's will is often not straightforward and if we're serious about doing so then we need to take advantage of every means we can. This includes keeping our hearts open to God, being willing to hear things from Him that we don't like, listening to one another, and especially paying very close attention to those who have gone before. The four gospel books in the New Testament give us the best insight we have into the life and teachings of Jesus - the author and finisher of our faith - and the rest of the New Testament records the deeds and teachings of those who knew Jesus and/or carried his message in the early days. These people are more qualified than any of us to speak for him, and we have to take extremely seriously anything they have to say. In addition, Jesus himself and his early followers held the Old Testament in extremely high regard and understood Jesus' life and teachings in the context of, and as a fulfilment of, the story that it contains. As Jesus' followers then, we are compelled to do the same.

So as a believer in Jesus, I still feel it is necessary to hold a very high view of scripture, in spite of the caveats that I've just mentioned. This is not always straightforward though, and at times I have found it to be a considerable source of personal tension.

There's lots of great stuff in the Bible that I don't have any fundamental problems with - even though some of it is personally very challenging. The bits I particularly do have a problem with though, are the bits that seem to present God's character in an unpleasant light. For example, compare this:

God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
    - 1 John chapter 4 verse 16 - in the New Testament

with this:

When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you. However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. When the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. Only the women and the children and the animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which the Lord your God has given you.
    - Deutoronomy chapter 20 verses 10-14 - in the Old Testament

Where do you start with this passage? Forced labor!? Killing every man in the city!? Treating (now bereaved) women and children as your "booty"!? This sounds more like something I would expect to hear from ISIS than from "God is love"!

Well the "good news", first of all, is that these are instructions given to a particular group of people - the Israelites - under a particular set of circumstances in a particular place and time. These are not general instructions for Christians regarding how they ought to behave! Violent behaviour by believers towards others is not endorsed in the gospels or anywhere else in the New Testament. Instead, Jesus' teaching on violence generally involves phrases like "love your enememies", "pray for those who persecute you" and "turn the other cheek". (That's not to say that God doesn't occasionally come across as angry and vengeful, even in the New Testament, but perhaps that's a topic for another post!)

Christians today do not generally use passages like the one above as justification for killing people. This is not how Jesus operated and it's certainly not how his early followers operated either. But for me, that isn't the problem. The problem is - what do passages like this say about the God who I love and worship? And can I (or even should I?) love, trust, and worship a God like this? This has been a big problem for me. I have only ever experienced God as loving and compassionate. There are plenty of things in the world that are genuinely worth getting angry about and I have no doubt that God gets angry about some of them, but I still expect him to behave with wisdom and justice. I don't see very much of this in passages like the one above. If that passage really is telling the truth about God, then I don't know this God as well as I thought I did - and all of a sudden I feel a lot less sure if I really can trust Him or feel safe with Him!

I can understand why the Israelites might have behaved like this. I can see how for them, this might've been a normal way to do things - it probably was for most of the other nations around them at the time. I can see a lot in the Old Testament that is very positive and that seems to cut across many of the more negative cultural norms of the period. I can understand God patiently working with people who thought like this and behaved like this and gradually drawing them closer to Himself. I can understand God working through the cultural norms of the time in order to achieve a longer term objective that culminated in the life and teachings of Jesus and His self-giving death on the cross. I cannot understand though, God directly commanding the Israelites - or anybody - to do stuff like the above to anybody else!

God is God. He is in charge of life and death and He - and He alone - has the ultimate right to execute judgement on anyone. He is also the only one who is in a position to do so with perfect justice - being totally impartial and in complete possession of all the facts. But I can't understand - or accept - Him directly carrying out this kind of justice - if that's even what this is - through imperfect human agents. Those who try to defend passages like the above often point out some of the terrible and barbaric practices that many of the nations surrounding Israel were involved in at that time, implying that they were in fact only getting what they deserved. Even if this is true and God had simply decided that enough was enough, how could He use His own people - who He says He loves - to do such a terrible thing? Nobody can treat others in such an appalling fashion without having their own humanity deeply scarred by the experience!

I did notice one new thing about this passage when re-reading it yesterday, which is that it is Moses, rather than God Himself, who is giving the Israelites these instructions. This gives me a little hope that perhaps the passage reflects Moses' world view a little more than it does God's! There are other places though, where it is recorded that God Himself gave fairly similar instructions, albeit - inevitably - through one of His other mouth pieces. Moses himself is generally considered to be the greatest of the Jewish prophets who walked extremely closely with God, and seems to often be assumed to be speaking on God's behalf. Maybe though, that assumption doesn't always hold true? Maybe God left Moses quite a large amount of room to interpret what He wanted, within the parameters of what Moses considered to be normal at the time...?

I realise at this point though, that I am stretching the text in an attempt to interpret it in the way that I would like it to read. And so I am still left with a difficult problem - which is that the God of the Old Testament does not seem to me to consistently be a God of love. There is a lot of love in the Old Testament and much of it comes from God, but there is also too much there for my liking that looks very suspiciously like its opposite and as yet I am unable to fully reconcile this.

For myself, I am persuaded that God is a God of love. Ultimately, only love can make sense of the world and of life. If God is arbitrary and capricious, then where do all my high ideals come from? Why do I even have a concept of love and morality? If it's all some big cosmic joke, then it isn't very funny and ultimately God isn't laughing either - if that's the best He can do then it's no more satisfying for Him than for anyone else! If there is no God then it's all ultimately meaningless, and enlightened self-interest, rather than self-giving compassion, is the best of the available bad set of options! But if God is real and Jesus is His best representation, then - in spite of all the mess and the pain - life is ultimately good and is deeply, deeply worth suffering and sacrificing for!

So I still have a mismatch between the God I see revealed in Jesus and the God of the Old Testament. The best I can do is to suggest that the Old Testament authors recorded things according to their best understanding at the time, and that God worked in them and through them - just as He does with us - in spite of all of that. But that doesn't dot all of the i's, and it doesn't cross all of the t's, and it still seems to leave rather a lot of open questions...!

[The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural]
[The Bible and Me Part VIII - Noah and the Flood]

Things I don't understand about God

Usually, when writing posts on this blog, I do my best to sound wise and knowledgeable. If you're laughing as you read this, then I may not have succeeded! At the very least I generally try to sound like a Christian who thinks about stuff and has at least some idea what he's talking about.

Generally then, I don't tend to spend a lot of time talking about the things I know I don't understand. So I thought it might make a nice change if I did!

Like most Christians I have doubts. Sometimes I look at the world and I wonder: Is there really a God after all? Am I just fooling myself? Usually my conclusion is that there is and I'm not, but sometimes I feel firmer in that conviction than others and there are always some questions that remain unanswered. So here is one of them:

It seems to me that pretty much everything in nature - at least in the animal kingdom - is ultimately based on violence. Violence is used to determine leadership, territory and mating. If you're a carnivore then you have to be violent in order to survive. If you're a herbivore then you either need to be violent enough to resist your attackers, or have some other way of avoiding, escaping from or defending yourself against violence if you want to live for very long.

One of the central tenets of the Christian faith though, is that God is love. Indeed, this is one of my central reasons for believing in God. Love is the only thing that really gives meaning to life. Without love, life doesn't make sense. It makes sense to me therefore, that the creator of the Universe would have love as His very essence. It also makes sense to me that God would be personal - not just some sort of impersonal cosmic force - as love is personal by definition, not something that can exist on its own in some kind of cosmic vacuum.

So why would a God of love create a natural order that has violence so deeply written into it? I don't understand this. One popular explanation among some evangelical Christians is that this is a result of 'the fall' - meaning that when Adam and Eve rebelled against God, the whole of creation changed and that it wasn't like this before. But there are several problems with this.

It seems fairly clear to me that the world has been here for a few billion years, despite what the young earth creationists might have to say about it. The Biblical creation story doesn't read to me like an account that is intended to be taken entirely literally, and even if it was, it says very little about the state of nature before the fall. It makes sense to me that the relationship between humans and the world would have been negatively affected by the breakdown in relationship between man and God. It even makes sense to me for the world to have suffered as a result of this, in ways we don't fully understand. All the records we have though, suggest that violence has been very much a part of life on planet earth, for a long time before human beings appeared.

So this is a question I don't know the answer to - although it doesn't stop me from believing in God. I wonder what you think?

Reconciled

In my previous post, I discussed how - at least according to the Biblical creation story - human beings have become estranged from their creator God. I argued that, whether or not this story is taken literally, its lessons remain valid.

Having discussed the problem I now want to introduce what I (and Christians everywhere) believe is the solution - specifically, the person, Jesus of Nazareth.

Many different religions have come up with different ways to address what is perceived to be the gulf between us and God, or us and perfection, or us and some kind of happiness/fulfilment, either now or in the life to come. There is much wisdom in many of these traditions, but Christianity - as far as I'm aware - is the only faith to claim that God has done something very specific from his side to solve this problem. According to the Christian faith, God isn't just sitting there waiting for us to work it all out - in fact he's very aware that although we may have caused this problem, it isn't one we are capable of solving all by ourselves.

So God - as Jesus - came and visited His creation. A ridiculous claim? Well, maybe, but one that I and many millions of other believers have become convinced is the truth. By coming here he showed and taught his followers and the rest of us how to live. And just by being who He was - challenging hypocrisy, standing up for justice, upsetting the status quo - he provoked his enemies into showing everyone how not to live as well! His presence brought out the best - and the worst - in human nature, as goodness always does when it refuses to back down. Driven by insecurity and jealous rage, his enemies crucified him as a common criminal, though He was innocent of any crime.

But what kind of God allows His enemies to do something like that? A weak God? An impotent God? Someone who isn't really any kind of God at all? Those enemies though, were not just a select group of angry people. In some ways they actually represented the whole human race. They reacted to Jesus the same way all of us often react to God. We are selfish, suspicious, protective of our own interests. We all like to be in control and react angrily at times when that control is threatened or taken away. All of us are capable of crucifying God in our hearts, and many of us do, every day!

So why not destroy us all? - something God is well able to do! But God wanted to do things a different way. His heart is full of love towards us, in spite of the hostility He often finds, and He wanted reconciliation, not war. So instead, He took the beatings and the mocking and the agonising death and the shame. He let humanity - let all of us - do their worst. Given a free reign, man had to kill God. It was the only logical outcome, right from our first rejection of Him when we ate from that tree (see previous post), but God wasn't going to leave it there!

Because of course you can't kill God - not in the end - and there was no way man was going to win. That wasn't the point though. God didn't want to "win" - and refused to fight on those terms. God just wanted to make it clear that in the end He couldn't lose. And one more much more important thing: God wanted to make it clear that He really does love us, no matter what we do! According to Luke's gospel, Jesus' actually prayed on the cross for His persecutors to be forgiven. Then after He died and rose from the dead - according to the Biblical accounts - He didn't come back with holy vengeance to wreak havoc on his enemies. Instead He slipped quietly away. And left His followers with a message of peace and reconciliation for anyone who would listen - that anyone who trusted in Him, could be forgiven for their sins and the relationship with God could be healed.

You might think it would've all fizzled out after that, but no. 2,000 years later, that message is still going strong and has completely changed the shape of this world. There are also many distorted forms of it around and it has been used and abused by those with vested interests, just as many of the powerful guardians of Jewish religion did in Jesus' day.

Its impact has not been lost though, and the central message of reconciliation is just as powerful now as it was then. Believe in Jesus - trust in Him, trust that He loves you, trust that He wants the best for you, be willing to learn to live life His way - and you too can be forgiven and reconciled with the creator God, the God who loves you and wants to be your father again!

The Truth About Me

This is a follow on to my previous post about Truth.

In that post I commented that there are some truths that seem too big or too scary to face and that consequently we sometimes prefer to delude ourselves. I also suggested though, that if the greatest truth of all is positive - that there is a God who loves and cares about us and will work out everything for good in the end - then it becomes possible to confront all of these awful lesser truths.

One of the truths that is often hardest to deal with is the truth about ourselves. A person's ability to see themself in a positive light will often depend, to a large extent, on the way they have been treated by others, particularly during the earliest and most impressionable years of their life. Low self-image is a curse for many people and not something I take lightly, having suffered with it for many years myself. On the flip side though, however good we may think we are (and there are many good things about all of us), we all carry dark secrets in our hearts that we conceal from everyone, and sometimes even from ourselves. The book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament part of the Bible puts this aptly and very starkly: "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?".

From the outside, I'm pretty sure I don't look like an evil person. I give money to charity. I've never murdered anyone. My wife seems to think I'm mostly a good husband. I'm generally reliable and conscientious. I don't steal. I have a speeding ticket, but that was due to a lapse in concentration rather than a contemptuous disregard for the law... I'm not perfect of course, but I think you get the general idea!

So what dark secrets do I hide? What's so terrible about me...? The truth is I am afflicted by a killer disease which brings death and darkness to my soul! When I hold an honest mirror to the depths of my own heart I often hate what I see. I see insecurity, jealousy, selfishness, pride. I see character traits that - if fully acted on - would render me unloved and unlovable by all but the most determined and long-suffering of friends. And so - I conform. I maintain an appearance of decency and keep my worst excesses in check. I am glad to say though - before you think me a complete fraud - that I am sometimes also stirred by good and noble motives!

In the Bible, in chapter 7 of the book of Romans, the apostle Paul describes his struggle with what he calls his "sinful nature" like this:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do ... I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing ... What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Facing the truth about ourselves is hard, especially when it's bad, which in part at least it is - for all of us. Not facing up to a bad truth won't make it go away though. It still affects us and if anything its effect is more insidious because:

1. We're not wise to it.
2. We can't do anything to change it.

So, as Jesus said (see previous post), knowing the truth - even when it's bad - has the potential at least to set us free. But what if we can't see any way past it - surely then it's better to just bury our heads in the sand?

But - to repeat again what I also said in my previous post - if the ultimate truth is good, then any lesser truth can be squarely and honestly faced. In particular, the truth about ourselves can be faced because:

1. God loves us anyway.
2. He has made a way - through Jesus - for this unpleasant truth to be dealt with!

If you would like to know more about this, then please click here.

Dachau

To anyone who regularly or even semi-regularly reads this blog - I'm sorry it's been so long since I last posted.  My inspiration seems to have dried up a bit recently, plus I've been on holiday in Germany for 2 weeks and only got back 4 days ago.

Whilst in Germany though, I visited Dachau concentration camp, and thought this might be an interesting subject for a blog entry.  It sounds like a rather depressing subject I have to admit, but although I did find the visit very moving, I (surprisingly perhaps) didn't find it a depressing experience and would recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity to make a similar visit.

Dachau was the first of the Nazi concentration camps and served as a model for most of the others.  It wasn't an extermination centre in the same way as some of the others (e.g. Auschwitz), but over 25,000 people died there nevertheless, due to the terrible conditions and treatment.  Many prisoners were tortured, used for medical experiments, or murdered by the prison guards.  After the war, the camp was used as a prison for SS officers awaiting trial, then as a refugee camp and eventually it ended up as a memorial site primarily due to the efforts of ex-prisoners.

We were taken on a tour of the camp and told various stories about the kind of welcome inmates used to receive when they arrived, the conditions in the camp and also its eventual liberation by the invading American army.  Parts of this tour were very moving and I found myself on the verge of tears a couple of times while trying to imagine what some of these people must have been through.  I cried a bit later on as well, after looking around the exhibition.

Despite the pain and the horror of what happened here though, the overwhelming feeling I came away with was one of hope, but tempered by the reality of suffering and the depths to which humanity can sink.  For those who lived through Dachau - or any of the other concentration camps - and for those close to them or to those who didn't survive, these are defining experiences that have shaped their whole lives, but nevertheless - and partly due to their efforts - hope has still been able to come out of these appalling tragedies.

One of the things that has always impressed me about Germany as a nation - and Dachau epitomises this - has been its willingness - it's determination even - to face up to and come to terms with its past.  Terrible things were done in Germany by Germans and many other Germans, for various reasons, did not prevent this from taking place.  There were all sorts of reasons why this happened and I'm not sure any of us are in a position to judge how we would have behaved under similar circumstances (see the Stanford prison experiment as an example of how easily "ordinary" people can be influenced to do terrible things), but Germany hasn't tried to sweep any of this under the carpet.  The attitude is that yes, this did happen.  It was terrible and it's painful now to remember, but let's face up to it, learn from it and move on!  In this way the past can be redeemed, and is being.  Instead of breeding bitterness and resentment which leads to more and more problems, it has become a seed of hope and healing as the sins of a nation are confessed, acknowledged and dealt with.

To me it seems significant that the Dachau site now includes a significant, explicitly spiritual presence.  The site contains Jewish and Catholic monuments in honour of those from both faiths who were incarcerated and/or died here.  There is also an Orthodox Christian chapel, a Protestant chapel and a convent of Carmelite nuns.  The Carmelites' aim is, "to make this place, where there has been so much horror in the past, into a place of offering and prayer, and to establish here a living symbol of hope."

Spirituality goes right to the heart of mankind's search for meaning and the presence of suffering often brings these kinds of questions more sharply into focus.  They are not questions that can be satisfied by simple, logical answers - they require us to reach out to something deeper, something beyond ourselves and the feeble limitations of our daily lives.

According to the Christian story, this something is a someone - a God who loves us in spite of all the suffering that we experience and inflict on one another.  For whatever reason, suffering is part of the world order that we currently inhabit, but the Bible holds out the promise that it will not always be like this.  According to the Christian story, God has not kept Himself aloof from suffering but has participated in it fully - as Jesus - by being tortured and executed on a cross.  Jesus did not respond with bitterness to those who treated Him in this fashion, instead he prayed, "Father forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing".  His followers - at least those who have taken His message seriously - have always tried to continue in this tradition.

The Bible also teaches that Jesus' death was not the end - and that out of His suffering, and His resurrection, has come hope for all of us!  On the cross, Jesus stared evil in the face, suffered its full effects, yet remained steadfast in love for His creation.  Because of this He overcame, was resurrected and now extends reconciliation and forgiveness to all those who come to Him.  He knows what you've been through - and also what you are capable of! - and He alone is now fully able to heal, forgive and restore.

Being a Christian - What do I get out of it?

Someone asked me this morning (see the comments on this post) what I get out of being a Christian (to be more precise, the question was what do I get out of God, but this is how I've interpreted it).

The answer is, I get all sorts of things, but I thought I'd try and cover a few here. I realise not all my readers will share my beliefs but to me these things are very real and so for now I will dispense with saying things like, "I think", or, "in my opinion".

This is how it seems to me and this is my experience:

First of all, the best and most important thing I get out of this is God Himself! God created and sustains the whole Universe and yet is interested in, and has time for me! Not only does He have time for me though, He loves me passionately! This is not something I always find it easy to get my head round, but I get powerful glimpses sometimes and - in a good way - it shakes me to the core!
My relationship with God is central to a lot of what I am and what I do with my life. I know lots of people - Christian and not - who can be very loving sometimes, but I don't know anyone who displays the passionate self-giving love I see in Jesus. This love inspires and motivates me - gives me something to aim for - but also encourages, supports and forgives me when I fail.

Prayer and worship - which from the outside perhaps look to some people like meaningless rituals, designed perhaps to try to win God's approval? - to me are usually a delight. I don't pray or worship to get God's approval, I do these things because I have His approval (unwarranted as that might be) and because it's a delight to spend time with Him. Prayer is a mystery I don't have room to try and explore properly here, but it changes things, and it's a 2-way thing. It involves listening to God and working with Him, because our input matters to Him and He wants to involve us in His purposes.

Worship too, is a 2-way thing. It isn't just telling God how wonderful He is - it's a reaching out to God who sweeps you up in His embrace, lifts your spirits heaven-ward and raises your perspective above and beyond the day to day joys and struggles of life.

Beyond these immediate benefits, being a Christian also gives me hope for the future. I believe in a God who is good and who will one day straighten everything out. He has allowed evil and suffering to exist in His world, but only for a time - these things are temporary and are not destined to have the last word. There will be a day when evil has had its chance, done its worst, been fully shown up for what it really is, and is defeated once and for all. Being a Christian means being part of defeating evil now - not through superior might or aggression though, but the way Jesus did it - through self-giving sacrificial love. Being a Christian gives me hope that it's worth working for a better world - even if the fruits aren't immediately visible, even if my efforts seem futile - because Jesus' resurrection is a foretaste of the future, a sign that good will triumph and that one day I will be a part of it!

Being a Christian also gives me a sense of perspective. It does give a sense of meaning to my life, and it's the only central meaning that really makes sense to me in the end which is love. I'm pretty selfish sometimes and find love difficult, but I've encountered in God someone who really is truly loving and gives me hope that I can learn to be the same. Love, in my view makes sense of everything. If people are loved then they are valuable - intrinsically, for who they are, and life has meaning. Without love, it's ultimately just a competition to survive - and perhaps to get the most possible pleasure out of your short, pointless existence. Love means we're all worth the same - because it's about who we are and not about what we can contribute. If I don't think you're worthy of love then I'm in trouble, because there's nothing intrinsically different about us. We all have our faults, strengths and weaknesses. So in my mind, love is the ideal, but true, unselfish love is not something to which humans naturally aspire. It is at the very heart and nature of God though - or if it isn't, then I think we are all ultimately lost anyway...

Oh - How He loves us!

OK, I realise I did pick the URL, "thescepticalbeliever" for this blog, but there are some things I just can't afford too much scepticism over! :-)

I just love this song - not so much for the music as for the lyrics and the passion that lie behind them. This song sums up for me, passionately and beautifully, what the God I worship is all about:

He is jealous for me
Loves like a hurricane
I am a tree
Bending beneath
The weight of his wind and mercy
When all of a sudden
I am unaware of these
Afflictions eclipsed by glory
And I realize how beautiful you are
And how great your affections are for me

Oh how he loves us so
Oh how he loves us
How he loves us so

Yea He loves us
Oh how

We are his portion
And he is our prize
Drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes
If grace is an ocean we're all sinking
So heaven meats earth like a sloppy wet kiss
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest
I don't have time to maintain these regrets
When I think about the way
He loves us

Oh how he loves us so
Oh how he loves us
How he loves us so

Yea He loves us
Oh how

God of Natural Disasters?

According to a recent survey, 44 percent of Americans and 59 percent of American white evangelical Christians believe that natural disasters are or could be a sign or message from God.

So as a British evangelical(ish) Christian, what do I think?  I'm not entirely sure, so I thought if I tried to write about it I might be able to work something out!

First of all, I have to believe that God is love. This is fundamental to the Christian faith and to my own understanding of God and the Universe. I therefore find it hard to imagine God deliberately - and for no reason at all - willing destruction and misery on large numbers of people, e.g. the recent tsunami in Japan.

Thanks to modern science, we now have some knowledge of the processes that cause natural disasters - e.g. tectonic plate movements that cause earthquakes and tsunamis. This would seem to suggest that they are just blind natural processes that happen to occur in places we'd rather they didn't - e.g. where some of us have built our homes!

How can this be reconciled though, with the idea of a God who not only made everything, but also takes an active interest in His creation? Why would God make a world which was subject to these kinds of events and why would He allow them to occur, in spite of the death and suffering they cause? Is it because He doesn't care. Is He being deliberately malicious? Is it possible that He does actually cause some of these events in order to try and communicate through them in some way? Or is the real answer, "none of the above", or perhaps even a bit of a mixture?

The classic evangelical Christian response to all of this - at least in my experience - is that when God first made the world it was "perfect" so there wouldn't have been any natural disasters, but when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the garden of Eden all that changed. "Sin" entered the world and a fundamental disconnect was created between man and God and also between God and His creation. The creation itself suffered as a result of man's disobedience and so natural disasters, along with all manner of other ills, entered the equation.

This is a nice story but it doesn't really fit with the scientific evidence, which suggests that the world has been in a pretty much constant state of flux since it first formed about 5 billion years ago. Also though, I can't see any direct claims in the Bible itself that natural disasters are a consequence of Adam and Eve's rebellion, or that they didn't exist before that point (whether or not the Adam and Eve story is meant to be taken literally, which is another question!).

I do think though, that human beings were created to be rulers and priests over God's creation (for more on this see my other post on this subject), and that this role involves acting as mediators between God and the world and bringing harmony to it through our wise stewardship. When we cannot perform this role effectively due to our own estrangement from God, then to some extent creation will suffer, but I can only really speculate as to what physical effects this might have.

I do quite like Father David Cloake's explanation of natural disasters here, which hinges on the idea that the world is alive and that life requires change and at times upheaval - both as a consequence and also as a prerequisite for growth and development. In the end, to be overly safe is to be suffocated by mundanity. No parent (i.e. God) wants their children to be hurt, but by protecting them from all danger you ultimately do them more harm than good because they can never truly learn or develop.

I was also struck by this spoof article on the Onion website, about the positive effect that disasters sometimes have on human nature. Suffering can make us bury our heads in the sand in despair, or it can call out everything that is good in us in response. Suffering presents all of us with both a challenge and an opportunity to be truly "human", in the best and most positive sense of that word.

I recognise that in discussing all these options, I haven't really answered the question, but this is what I think so far:

• Did God make the world? - yes!
• Does God love people? - yes!
• Does He allow natural disasters to happen? - yes!
• Could He prevent them? - yes!
• Why doesn't He? - I've made some suggestions above but I'm sure there's more to it than this. I doubt if there's any simple "one size fits all" answer. It also seems entirely possible to me that He has done on occasion, though it would be hard to prove on the basis of something that didn't happen!
• Does He ever cause them directly? - I don't know. There is some evidence in the Bible that He has done on occasion. I see no reason why He couldn't if He wanted to and I don't know what reasons He might have, but I'm personally willing to trust that He would only do so if they were very good ones!
• Does God "speak" to us through natural disasters and if so, in what ways? - I think natural disasters speak to us in a number of ways, and as God made the world, so these could be seen as messages from our creator.
  
  • They encourage us to reach out to God, by reminding us of our mortality and the fragility of our lives.
  • By inspiring empathy in those not affected, they remind us of our shared humanity and challenge us to love one another.
  • They challenge us to learn and develop and adapt to changes in our environment.
  • They remind us of our dependence on the earth and our need to live in harmony with it.
  • It's also possible that in specific circumstances God may communicate through natural disasters in other ways but I think I've kind of run out of space to explore that properly here...

Love in Action

I recently had my attention drawn to this article on the Guardian "Poverty Matters Blog", describing efforts being made in Mali by local NGO, AEDM, to help local farmers adapt to the effects of climate change.  Faced with shorter and heavier rainy seasons, AEDM have helped villagers develop better composting techniques, and build raised, flash-flood-proof vegetable plots.

The author of the article seems full of praise for the scheme, but finishes by noting that, "the challenge to get funds down to this kind of micro level is daunting", and that, "the simplest, cheapest small-scale solutions are often the last to get the funding they need".

The author doesn't explain however, how AEDM are funded at the moment, or in fact, who AEDM actually are!  I've only recently heard of them myself and don't know where all their funding comes from, but I do know that "AEDM" stands for "Agence Evangélique de Développement du Mali" - the Mali Evangelical Development Agency - and that they are at least partially funded by various world-wide partnerships including one with UK Christian development charity, Tearfund, which my wife and I support.  I know how Tearfund are funded because their annual report is available here.  Of the £61 million income they had last year, £40 million came from supporter donations and £28 million of this was from individuals such as my wife and myself, most of whom are likely to be British Christians of an evangelical persuasion (since this is Tearfund's primary supporter base).

Religion often gets a bad press for being a source of oppression and/or conflict, but for me this is a prime example of the church doing what it does best, where the "church" in this case consists not of an institution, but of various, otherwise unconnected Christian groups that have 2 things in common:

1. They love Jesus.
2. They want to demonstrate that love in action by doing something practical to help make the world a better place.

Tearfund (among others) does a brilliant job of exploiting this "network".  Their strategy is to partner with and support local organisations like AEDM who have a similar or compatible vision, and are on the ground and understand the local situation - often working through local churches, which provide instant access to a pool of volunteers who are well integrated into the community.  The AEDM project and many others like them work by empowering local people to take control of their situation, rather than making them dependent on handouts.

Christians don't always get much recognition for this sort of thing - the Guardian article about AEDM referenced at the start of this post doesn't even mention the word "Christian" and avoids explaining what AEDM actually stands for! - but it is nevertheless a big part of the way the Christian faith is lived out, every day by ordinary believers all over the world, and perhaps provides some proof that at some level at least, Jesus Christ is actually making a difference!

Aid to Pakistan

Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, has called on the government to seek commitments to human rights and religious freedom in exchange for aid money given to Pakistan - going so far as to brand present foreign policy "anti-Christian" because these guarantees are not in place.

According to a report published by Vatican-approved agency, "Aid to the Church in Need", 75% of religious persecution around the world is directed against Christians and 100 million people are affected. The Pakistani minority affairs minister Shahbaz Bhatti - the only Christian member of the Pakistani cabinet - was assassinated in Pakistan at the start of March by Islamic fundamentalists. Despite being warned in advance of the assassination attempt by security agencies, the Pakistani government failed to give him any extra protection.

Shahbaz Bhatti's death was a tragedy, not just for his family and friends but for the whole of Pakistan, which desperately needs liberal voices to stop it from becoming an oppressive hardline Islamic state. Having said that though, I nevertheless have to disagree with the Cardinal's comments...

Religious persecution - any persecution - is a terrible thing, and we should be doing everything we can to discourage and prevent it, but the Cardinal's words seem to me to contradict the words of Jesus himself, who told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. This ought to be a key distinctive of the Christian faith - that we repay evil with kindness and show love unconditionally. This most emphatically was not done during the most dark and shameful period of church history - the Crusades - for which many Muslims worldwide still have not forgiven us. We should be doing everything possible to live in the opposite spirit to those terrible days.

I am horrified by the spirit I see manifested behind Islamic fundamentalism in places like Pakistan, but Christians are nevertheless called to love all Muslims - fundamentalist, extremist or otherwise - as we are to love anyone else. Aid should never be given with conditions attached, except for the condition that it goes to whoever needs it the most. In no sense can this be called "anti-Christian" - it's actually about as Christian as it gets!

Does being a Christian make you a better person?

This is a question I've puzzled over for some time.

I fear that many - perhaps even most - non-believers would answer that it doesn't. Many would even suggest it does the opposite - that Christians are hypocritical, judgemental, self-righteous, out of touch, etc. Mahatma Ghandi for example, who had many sympathies with the Christian faith but remained a committed Hindu all his life, is alleged¹ to have once said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians".

For myself I've known some Christians who seem to be genuinely "saintly", in the best popular sense of that term - kind, caring, generous, patient, loving, big-hearted people. I've also come across some very saintly people who are not Christians, but my general experience of most people is that they are a mixed bag of tricks. I can sometimes be shocked by a person's arrogance or selfishness or their apparently shallow or short-sighted attitude, and then shortly afterwards be amazed at the same person's kindness or sensitivity in a different situation.

What about me though? Does being a Christian make me a better person? This is a hard question to answer. For one thing, I was raised in a Christian family and made my first commitment to Jesus when I was four and a half. It's difficult to remember what I was like before this and given the age difference between now and then I hardly think it would be a fair comparison in any case! I was brought up with certain moral standards. For example I was taught to respect and obey authority (this may have been over-emphasised...), always to tell the truth, not to swear, not to engage in physical violence, not to steal, etc.

It wasn't until my early teens however, when I began to question my faith and had my first major experience of God that I can remember, that I first began to realise how selfish I was. God showed me all sorts of unpleasant things about my heart that didn't seem to have been touched by all those rules I'd learned to follow. God also showed me - at the same time - how much He loved and accepted me, which felt great at the time, but which I began to lose sight of as I realised that all of those bad attitudes didn't seem to be changing very much!

For a long time I've compared myself and other Christians to those who don't seem to know God or Jesus and wondered if it really does make any difference. I can always find ways to compare myself unfavourably with others. Likewise I can usually find some way in which I think I excel - but even as I am internally praising my moral superiority over some poor, unenlightened heathen, I notice my own judgemental self-righteousness and am knocked back down a peg again!

What can I say now? That I'm still very much in process and have learnt that following Jesus is a journey. That without love and acceptance I'm unable to change - I just get discouraged and frustrated, which ends up encouraging and re-inforcing the same negative attitudes and behaviours that I'm trying to replace! That I suffer from the same moral weaknesses and afflictions as everyone else but have learnt that discipline and good habits can make a difference. Finally, that I can't do it alone - I need help from God and from others who are similarly committed to developing this way of life.

Does being a Christian make me a better person? I hope that it slowly is doing - but only time, and those around me, can really say.

1 This has been disputed - see here - but I still think it unfortunately sums up many people's feelings towards the Christian faith.

Hidden Where Everyone Can See

I finished my last post with a quote from Jesus about how, paradoxically, God often hides truth from the "wise and learned" (or at least, from those who think they are). I also commented that I don't think any amount of scientific investigation will ever prove irrefutably that God exists. That's not to say though, that I don't think there's any evidence!

It's often been said that the best place to hide something is in plain sight, because people often have a tendency to miss things that are right under their noses. It seems to me that the evidence for God's existence is everywhere - it's completely obvious whilst also being quite easy to ignore. The apostle Paul takes a similar line in the New Testament book of Romans:

"For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." - Romans 1 verse 20

No-one really knows - ultimately - how the universe came to be. For every scientific answer we can give there will always be another question, e.g. "why did that happen?", "what was before that?", etc. God as the final answer doesn't really solve this problem because it just raises similar questions, e.g. "where did God come from?", "how did He come into being", etc. Perhaps the main difference with the God answer though, as the final answer that ultimately underlies all other good and true answers, is that it includes the conviction that this question will never be answered. God is the final answer by definition - He is, among other things, that which always was and ever will be.

The universe and our world appear to be full of "co-incidences", without which life as we know it, and probably life of any kind, would not be sustainable (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis). To me these are markers of God's providence, but for sceptics there will always be other possible explanations.

Apart from being full of "co-incidences", the universe is also full of awe - wonder and beauty. There is so much out there to delight and astound us. Why is it all so wonderful? Why does it affect us in this way? Why is there even an "us" to be so affected? Some people think these reactions can (at least potentially) be explained by evolution, which in turn is governed entirely by the need to survive. To me though, this is evidence of the spiritual side of life and the existence of something higher of which we are a part.

The Biblical creation story (which I take as metaphor, rather than as literal scientific truth), says we were made in God's image and put here as stewards - to look after His world. If instead we did get here purely by evolution, then in my view evolution still has a lot of explaining to do. Somehow we appear to have broken the mould - the system has produced something which has broken out of the system and now has the formidable power to destroy it!

And finally, there is love. From a purely logical and personal point of view it doesn't make any sense. Why should I put someone else's welfare before my own? Why should I value another person, unless I personally benefit from this transaction? And yet we all need to be loved - for who we are and not just for what we can contribute - and we all know that if we could all love each other, the world would be a far far better place!

The Bible teaches that God is love. Love comes from God and we are all loved by Him. God showed His love to the ultimate, by sacrificing Himself / giving up His Son (it reads both ways) - demonstrating that He really meant business. This is a God we can trust - not one we need to rebel against. A God who really does have our best interests at heart and will go to any lengths necessary on our behalf. The way of love though, is the way of sacrifice, and not the way of power that we all crave. It means laying down all our petty power and control strategies and learning to trust. I'll let you know when I get the hang of it… :-)

The Shape of Love

Another cartoon from the naked pastor:

This is what the naked pastor has to say about this image:

"This guy has just come into the awareness that love is in the air. He’s realized that he is surrounded and sustained by love. He hears love. He thinks love. He speaks love. He breathes love. No, he hasn’t subscribed to any creed. He has just come to know, deep within, that Love, the Blessed, the Beautiful Benediction, is above all, through all, and in all things. It is That from which all things come and That to which all things go. He smiles."

My view is that without love, nothing ultimately makes sense.  Love is the one thing from which everything derives meaning.  Life, the Universe, everything, is suffused with love - but often, although it's all around us, we just don't seem to know where to look for it!

Love though, isn't something that can simply exist in abstract.  Love is always personal - love has to come from someone.  This is what the Bible has to say:

"God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him."

Many different religions have many different things to say about God.  Some don't even seem to recognise that love is part of the equation, let alone God's primary and over-arching characteristic! Many people on the other hand are against all religious creeds and doctrines because of their capacity to restrict and divide. I assume this is why, according to the naked pastor, the guy in the picture is creed-free.

Well it's true - you don't need to subscribe to any creed or doctrine to understand, appreciate or show love - and neither do you need me to tell you that!  Love transcends race, culture, class, gender, sexuality.  It will cross any barrier except for those of entrenched pride or selfishness and even then it will not give up until it has exhausted every effort.  But the Bible also has this to say:

"This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."

This isn't a creed (although it's been included in many) but it is a statement which you can choose whether to believe or not.  It's one of those places where God's love becomes concrete and personal - in fact in many ways about as personal as it gets!
Love cannot be confined to a creed, but neither is it nebulous or void.  Love has a shape and to me, Jesus is the shape of Love!