The Bible and Me Part VII - The Supernatural

[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]
[The Bible and Me Part VI - The Difficult Bits]

So far in this series, I've taken what many hard-line evangelicals might see as a rather "liberal" approach to the Biblical text. I've pointed out that some parts of it - e.g. the creation narratives and the book of Job - don't appear to me to be intended as literal historical accounts. I've also suggested that even some of the parts that are written in a more "factual" style, may not be entirely and perfectly historically accurate.

For many who take such an analytical approach to the Bible, it often seems that the next logical progression is to doubt anything in it that smacks of the supernatural. In the modern western world we have little time for alleged phenomena that seem to defy scientific analysis and explanation. If it can't be explained scientifically then it can't really have happened - or at least, not quite the way it was recorded to have happened anyway.

In my view though, if you're going to try and strip out all the miracles from the Bible just because you find them hard to believe, then you might as well just go the whole hog and strip God out as well! Apart from the very existence of an omnipotent deity, the miraculous is right at the heart of the Christian faith, which includes two essential truths that are impossible to believe if you're not willing to believe in the supernatural:

1. That in some mystical way that no theologian ever seems to have completely got their head round, Jesus was "the Son of God" - i.e. He was God and came from God at one and the same time - He wasn't just an ordinary man.


2. That on the third day after He was crucified, Jesus miraculously rose again from the grave!

These truths are what make the Christian faith unique, and are at the heart of the power that it has to change people's lives and to turn this world upside down. These truths tell us:

1. That God is interested in us and our world.


2. That God is humble: He was happy to be treated as one of us, with no special airs or graces. In fact, more than that, He was willing to be mocked, ridiculed, persecuted and - ultimately - even tortured and executed by those He created.


3. That God cares - deeply and intensely - about His creation, hence His willingness to go through all of that in order to make a way for us to be reconciled to Him.


4. That death is not the final word. Jesus did something crazy - stupid even - He met violence and power with ... love and self-sacrifice! He taught His followers to love your neighbour and turn the other cheek and set the ultimate example in doing so Himself, and the result was ... death and defeat!! D'oh!!! But no! Just when they thought it was all over, on the third day Jesus appeared to His followers, risen from the dead, and a rag-tag bunch of defeated and disillusioned disciples were transformed into the most powerful evangelistic movement the world has ever seen: one which thrived under intense persecution as it followed Jesus' example, spread throughout the world, and 2,000 years later - in various forms (some more compromised than others!) - is still going strong today!

To deny the Resurrection or the Deity of Christ is to rip out the very heart of the Christian faith and to destroy the reason for the hope that we profess, and yet you can't believe in either of these things without also believing in the miraculous.

Apart from this, the miraculous was at the very heart of Jesus' life and ministry on earth. His miracles were often referred to as "signs", which is what they were; of who he was and what he had come to do. The miracles indicated that God and His kingdom - which Jesus, the "Messiah" had come to inaugurate - were breaking into the world in a real and tangible way; that God had literally come to dwell among His people. Some of the miracles were about healing and setting people free from physical and spiritual bondage. Others were about God's abundant and miraculous provision. Still others - seen only by Jesus' closest followers to whom He was ready to fully reveal Himself - spoke directly of His power and His Lordship, even over nature itself.

The myriad miracles in the gospels make up such a large, central and inseparable part of the accounts, that it isn't possible to strip them all out without emptying the gospels of most of their content, or radically altering the character, and massively reducing the potency of the Jesus who we Christians profess.

The miracles say that God is involved, God can be involved, and He's able to be involved in your life in a real and tangible way. And if you're willing to lift your eyes just a little higher - above what you think is possible and what you are able to explain, then you might just be surprised to discover that the God of miracles can still show Himself to you today...!

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

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]

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!

Estranged

I am not a Biblical literalist. Well I am, about certain things. I believe, for example, that the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, was (and is) more than just a person. I believe that he was God come among us and that, after being crucified, he was physically raised from the dead. The early Christians - who lived during and shortly after his lifetime - lived and died for this belief, and I hope that - if it ever came to it - I would be prepared to do the same.

There are other parts of the Bible though, which go much further back, the origins and accuracy of which are much more difficult, if not impossible to trace or to verify. We still have many good reasons to value them and take them seriously though, and in my experience God speaks powerfully through them and they have a great deal still to teach us.

The earliest story in the Bible (that is, the one with the earliest setting), is of course the story of creation. This is not one of the stories I take literally, although I know this is controversial for some of my fellow evangelical Christians. It is a story though, that teaches us some very important things - about ourselves, God and the world around us.

One of the things this story tries to get to grips with is the problem of estrangement. Its author(s) plainly believed that God was real and that He was good - so why did He always seem so distant? And why was there so much evil in the world? The author(s) deal(s) with this by telling a story. In this story, God creates the world - which of course He must have done, somehow - and then makes people to live in it. These people are somehow more than just animals. They are in fact - in some small but very significant ways - like God Himself. God looks after these people - He gives them everything they need - and He trusts them. He gives them responsibility to rule over His world and - crucially - He also lets them choose whether they will be faithful to Him, or ignore Him and go their own way.

In the story, Adam and Eve - our actual, or metaphorical, ancestors - choose to go their own way. They give in to the temptation - presented to them by a serpent - of becoming even more like God than they already are. They eat from the tree of the "knowledge of good and evil" - which is the only thing God has told them they mustn't do. By doing this they are choosing to end their reliance on God's wisdom (and by extension His mercy) and rely on their own judgement instead. Shame and guilt quickly enter the equation as they realise that - without God's help - they are at the mercy of standards they can no longer live up to.

This decision excludes them from God's abundance and provision. They are thrown out of "the garden" - where all their needs have been met, and God has walked and talked with them - into the much harsher world outside, where they are left to their own devices (more or less) in accordance with the choice they have made.

However literally or otherwise we take this story, we can see the reality of it in our own lives and its effects on us and the world around us. Apart from the suffering and evil that are sadly so characteristic of life, God also seems extraordinarily distant, to the extent that many of us doubt, or have even altogether rejected, His existence. The signs of His presence are still all around us though - in the amazing beauty and complexity of nature, wherever and whenever we experience true love, joy or compassion, in our capacity for awe and wonder and in our searching and heartfelt questions about the nature and purpose of reality and of life.

The good news of course is that God hasn't entirely abandoned His creation. The rest of the first part of the Bible (the "Old Testament") is the story of His dealings with a particular group of people, as they struggle to understand Him and live in relationship with Him, and as He prepares a way to heal the rift between Himself and humanity and repair the damage that has been done.

The healing of this rift was the primary purpose of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth - the subject of my first paragraph. How exactly this helps, is the subject of my next post …

The Hunger Games

The weekend before last (OK, so I'm getting a bit behind with my posts!) I went to see The Hunger Games.

For those who haven't seen it and are not familiar with the plot, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic future in a nation called PanEm, in the geographical area that was once North America. PanEm consists of 12 impoverished districts, which are ruled by a totalitarian government based in the wealthy and technologically advanced Capitol. As punishment for a previous rebellion, each year the districts must send 2 children each, from between the ages of 12-18 to compete in a televised fight to the death called, "The Hunger Games", from which only one contestant is allowed to emerge alive.

The film follows a girl called Katniss in particular, and also a guy called Peeta, as they are selected, trained for, and then compete in the games. None of the competitors want to be there, but they must learn to survive, and be willing and able to kill their fellow competitors if they want to make it back home alive to their families and friends.

During the preparation period, before they enter the arena, Peeta confides to Katniss, "I don't want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I'm not." This is the main dilemma faced by Peeta and Katniss (and many of the other contestants). They have been placed in a situation which has completely different rules from the ones that - in their hearts - they know they should be following, and indeed want to follow, and yet if they don't follow the rules of the game they are almost certain to lose everything. How will they respond?

I won't spoil the film for you if you haven't already seen it - and if you have, then you won't need my explanation - but it struck me that to some extent this is a dilemma shared by all of us. We live in a world that seems to be governed by many Rules that in our heart of hearts we would perhaps rather not have to follow. I'm not referring so much now though to rules made by governments, I'm thinking instead about the Rules that seem to emerge by themselves and which we come to accept as simply, "the way things are". Rules like, "it's a dog eat dog world", or, "you have to look out for number one", or even perhaps, "charity begins at home". It would be nice we might think, to look out for other people, to put their needs first and give to anyone who has need, but the world just doesn't work like that. We have to put our own needs first or we will lose out, and sometimes even our survival must take precedence over everything else.

Just over 2,000 years ago, another player entered the "arena" that is our world and chose to do things very differently. He challenged injustice, spent himself on behalf of others and didn't respond with violence even when others tried to kill him. The result? - he was tortured and then executed - just as you might expect, in accordance with the Rules in the previous paragraph. If that had been the end of the story, it would have simply confirmed our suspicion that no-one can get away with breaking the Rules for very long! Fortunately for us though, this wasn't the end, because for some reason, when this particular player chose not to play by the Rules, something very special happened ... he broke The Game!

The Bible teaches us that the world was never meant to work according to these Rules, rather, these are the Rules that came into play when people decided they wanted to run the world their way and could do so without any help from God. When God himself (in the person of Jesus) entered The Game and disobeyed its Rules, The Game broke, because it didn't have any power over the one who had created the world in the first place. It cost God dearly to do that - he paid the price demanded by The Game - but The Game couldn't keep him down. On the third day, he rose again bodily from the grave, appeared to his disciples, and returned to Heaven from whence he came. After this, he clothed his followers in Rule-breaking power and they went on to sacrifice themselves tirelessly and unselfishly to spread the message of his triumph, releasing everyone who believed their message to live their lives free from the Rules of The Game.

No Answers?

A few days ago, me and some friends at work had an interesting discussion about the state of the world economy, global injustice and all that kind of stuff. We were all kind of agreed that capitalism has gone a a bit wrong but none of us really seemed to have any good solutions. One person astutely pointed out that it isn't capitalism per se that's the problem, it's human nature, and capitalism in its present form is just one manifestation of that. People are selfish, people are greedy and whatever systems or regulations you set up, people will always try to find a way round them. Of course, that isn't to say that you shouldn't have systems, or that you shouldn't try to regulate!

A few minutes later, as I was mulling over the conversation, I mentioned that I'd read a book when I was a teenager called, "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger", and that it had messed me up for about 10 years afterwards! The book actually affected me for a lot longer than that and it probably still does, in spite of the fact that I can no longer remember any of the contents! What I do remember though, is that it made me feel incredibly guilty about the enormous disparity between rich and poor in the world and about how much wealth I horde, when so many others are doing well even to survive. One of my friends commented - respectfully I thought! - that I obviously think a lot about these sort of things. My response was that, yes, I do think about them, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have very much in the way of answers!

I often feel that as a Christian I ought to have answers. After all, I'm promoting a message which I believe is the ultimate answer - and yet I often feel that there are so many situations that I don't really know how to apply it to, and that this answer is such a long way from being fully worked out or reflected in my own life.

Much later on the same day, I was trying to think about why I didn't know the answers, or at least still don't seem to be able to apply them to my own satisfaction, and it occurred to me again - as it often has before - that in the end I only really have one answer. It isn't another system though, or another set of rules to be followed, it's a person and his name is Jesus. The heart of my faith isn't about rules or systems, it's about an encounter and a relationship with God-who-became-flesh: God who came and lived among us and gave up his life in sacrificial death because that was the extent of his love; who has ridiculously high standards of love and justice and yet lives up to all of them; who understands and has compassion on us in all our weaknesses and failings; who loves us and wants us to change and has the grace and the patience and the ability to make that possible.

This is my answer: That when I look at my life and see the difference between the man I am and the man I'd like to be, I have only to look at the smiling face of my father in heaven to know that I will get there one day and that in the meantime I can be patient as He is with me, knowing that I am loved and accepted and that I will be forever. And the more I appreciate the depth of His love and compassion for me, the more I am able to show the same compassion towards others and to strive for love, mercy, faithfulness and justice, knowing that I am doing the work of the one who loves me and who laid down His life for me and for all those I want to reach out to.

Faith and Fairy Stories

Christmas is a time for fairy tales.

There's that one about the jolly old fat man in a red suit, who travels around the world at the dead of night in a flying reindeer-pulled sleigh and climbs down chimneys undetected to leave us with free stuff.

Then there's that other one ... the one about a very unusual baby, born 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem, to a couple who had never slept together and yet - so the story goes - had not been unfaithful either. This birth was accompanied by strange signs in the heavens and the baby had strange visitors who would otherwise not even have known he was there. The God of the Universe had decided to visit His creation, and this was how He chose to make His entrance...

Nowadays, both stories are generally treated with considerable scepticism. Most people over the age of about 3 or 4 know the fat man story is just a fantasy - told by parents, purely for the purpose of injecting some extra magic into the festive season. As far as Jesus is concerned though, no serious historian would doubt that he existed, but whether some of the stories we have about the details of his life should be trusted or taken at all seriously, seems a lot more debatable.

The Bible contains 4 different accounts, by 4 different authors, which tell the story of a man who was more than just a man. This man performed incredible miracles - he healed lepers and blind people, he walked on water, he even raised people from the dead. And then - the greatest miracle of all - after being tortured and killed by the Roman oppressors, he rose from the grave on the third day and appeared to more than 500 of his disciples, before ascending bodily into heaven!

For a good chunk of the last 2,000 years, the truth of this story has been more-or-less taken for granted by the majority of people in the western world, but nowadays we are more sceptical. Miracles like that don't really happen. People don't walk on water and they certainly don't come back from the dead, so how can any account like that be taken seriously? The alternative? - his followers must have fabricated, or at least significantly exaggerated these stories after his death.

But if this is the case, his followers must have known that the stories they were spreading were a lie. They saw Jesus crucified (this event is recorded elsewhere, not just in the Bible), and knew that he was dead and buried. At the time at least, their hopes and dreams must have died with him on that cross. They really had believed - as had many other people - that Jesus was the Messiah - the prophesied deliverer that most Jews had been pinning their hopes on for hundreds of years. To see him naked and dead on a Roman cross must have shattered everything they had lived for. Where did they get the energy and resolve to carry on? And not just to carry on, but to found a worldwide movement that spread and flourished in the face of intense persecution, including severe torture and loss of life for those who had started the story in the first place.

Did the disciples really make it all up? The driving force which enabled the new movement to survive in the face of such incredible opposition was its adherents' belief that one day they too would rise from the dead, just as Jesus had done. Either that happened or it didn't - either the disciples' hopes died with Jesus, or something incredible happened to turn everything around - you can't just "exaggerate" a story like that!

I wonder which "fairy story" you believe...?

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.

The Gospel according to Harry Potter

WARNING: MAJOR PLOT SPOILER FOLLOWS!! DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE LAST HARRY POTTER BOOK OR SEEN THE FINAL FILM AND STILL INTEND TO DO SO!!

Last night I saw the eighth (were there really that many?!) and final Harry Potter film: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". The film has its moments but there's a strong sense of too much being packed into too short a space and over all it feels rushed and disjointed. There are one or two quite clever twists in the plot, but the film doesn't unfortunately do them much justice. However - my main aim in writing this post is not to provide a critical review of the film, but to discuss some of its contents.

An atheist friend with a highly sceptical view of the Christian faith recently made a comparison between the Bible and the Harry Potter books - the implication being that the former was perhaps no more truthful than the latter! After seeing the last of the Harry Potter films last night though, I found myself wanting to make a comparison in the other direction.

To summarise the plot very briefly, the evil and powerful wizard Voldemort, who threatens to destroy all that is good, has hidden parts of his soul in seven different places called "horcruxes" - thus making himself almost impossible to kill. Harry and his friends have the task of finding and destroying these horcruxes before Voldemort kills Harry and takes over the world. When the sixth and penultimate horcrux has been destroyed though, Harry learns that there is in fact an eighth: When Harry was a baby, Voldemort tried unsuccessfully to kill him, but was prevented from doing so by Harry's mother who gave her life in his defence. As a side effect of this attempt, a part of Voldemort's soul became accidentally lodged within Harry himself. The result is that now, in order for Voldemort to be killed, Harry himself must also die!

Challenged to confront Voldemort, and threatened with the death of all the other good wizards if he refuses, Harry accepts and faces him, knowing that he will be killed in the attempt. Harry has learned that he must be killed by Voldemort if the horcrux within him is to be successfully destroyed.

Voldemort kills Harry and thinks he has won, but Harry finds himself in some sort of spiritual limbo world where he meets Dumbledore (his mentor, killed in one of the previous films) and is given the option to return. To cut a long story short, he does so, there's a big fight with Voldemort, the final horcrux (located within Voldemort's pet snake) is destroyed and Voldemort is finally killed.

Having seen the previous seven films and having had some idea where the plot was going, Harry's self-sacrificial death didn't come as a big surprise, but I was surprised by just how closely this climax seemed to mirror the central message of the Christian faith.

The Christian gospel is all about Jesus, laying down his own life so that others could live free from the power of evil, but the parallels don't end there. Harry doesn't just die - willingly, as Jesus did - he is also similarly resurrected. And why does Harry die? Because the source of evil is within him, and so it is only by his death that evil itself can be destroyed. Similarly, the Bible teaches that Jesus took on sin for us - the language used is that He "became sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21) - so that through His sacrifice the power of sin (evil) could finally be destroyed. When Harry dies and is resurrected this isn't the end of the story, but Voldemort has been fatally weakened, and in true Hollywood tradition it is now only a matter of time before the victory Harry has gained by his sacrifice is realised, and Voldemort is finally destroyed. This too (deliberately? - I don't know) mirrors the Christian story - Jesus has died and been raised, but evil has not yet been fully vanquished. It is only through faith in Him and perseverance to the end that His victory is worked out and finally becomes complete in the lives of those who follow Him.

Of course, the films and the Christian story are not a perfect match!  There is a clear Christian influence but they don't serve as entire and perfect allegories. They do contain many other parallels however. For example, another central character is Dumbledore - the apparently all-wise good wizard who acts as Harry's primary mentor. He is not of course completely infallible, but in terms of his wisdom and the comfort and re-assurance he provides to Harry and the other good wizards he often came across to me as the God-figure within the story. He is the closest thing Harry has to a real life father, but it later transpires that Dumbledore knew all about the "horcrux" within Harry, and has in fact "set Harry up" to sacrifice himself - knowing that it is the only way to kill Voldemort. Snape - another central character - thinks this is deeply callous of Dumbledore and other characters also question his motives. In the same way, many who are critical of the Christian faith seem to feel that it was deeply callous of God (if indeed He did such a thing) to wish such a terrible fate on Jesus, His only Son. The ultimate message of the film though, seems to be that death is not the end and that there is a greater good to be gained. It is significant as well, that Harry makes the sacrifice of his own free will, regardless of Dumbledore's intentions. Dumbledore's character - as it is portrayed in the film - seems to be such that one could not imagine him having wanted it any other way!

As another friend has already pointed out to me, many of the themes that come through the Harry Potter story are universal and are not confined to the Christian faith, but I had to wonder how closely Rowling was influenced by Christianity and how deliberate, or otherwise, some of these parallels were.

So I did a little digging and came up with this Wikipedia article. Apparently, Rowling has had a Christian upbringing and despite her many (primarily evangelical) Christian detractors, does have a faith of sorts. She freely admits that this was a significant influence on the books, but also admits to struggling with her faith and says that these struggles are also reflected. Perhaps the parts about Dumbledore that I've mentioned above are one example of these struggles, where in the end Rowling comes out in favour of the Christian version of events?

Jesus - my imaginary friend?

I think most Christians - especially those of a sceptical and analytical bent - occasionally have doubts, and I should confess that this has sometimes been one of mine. Since a friend recently asked me if God is really just a grown up person's imaginary friend, I thought I would try to address this question here.

Many children have imaginary friends who apparently act as a source of comfort, companionship etc. - in fact many of the roles that God often seems to fulfil in the lives of those who believe in Him.

I can see why then, for unbelievers - especially those of a strongly atheist disposition - this might seem like the best way to explain the beliefs and "alleged" experiences of such as myself. If you're 100% convinced that God does not exist (as many atheists do claim to be), then you still need some sort of explanation for the persistence of millions of believers around the world who not only believe in God, but also claim to have encountered him in some way. This explanation would seem to fit the bill quite nicely!

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, I have occasionally wondered this myself. It seems most Christians experience times in their lives when God seems particularly distant. Many renowned spiritual authors have written about this phenomenon over the centuries. During times like these I have sometimes found myself wondering whether God was ever really real to me at all, or whether I just imagined the whole thing. Also, because I do have an enquiring mind and am not afraid to challenge others to question their own perspectives, it seems only fair that I should be willing to do the same. Accordingly, even when things have been going well, I have sometimes asked myself - is this really God? Am I just making this up? Is what I'm experiencing really just wishful thinking or some other kind of deep-seated psychological reaction?

The short and honest answer is that it's actually very difficult to be 100% sure! When you're in the middle of something that may or may not be a delusion, it's extremely difficult to completely step back from that and analyse it from a totally objective point of view - especially if it's something in which you have a very strong emotional investment! Obviously I want this to be true - and that does sometimes make honest attempts at debunking it quite difficult!

The conclusion I've generally come to though, is that there have just been too many things - too many "coincidences" if you like - to put this all down to chance and wishful thinking. Even if I was just talking about my own life and experience this would be true, but if I then factor in millions of other Christians around the world and their recorded experiences down through the centuries, and the extraordinary and surprising resonance I've so often found with my own, the only sensible conclusion seems to me to be that there really is some kind of external guiding hand out there - and the God of the Christians, especially as revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, seems to me by a long way to be the best available fit.

Some things I've experienced that could potentially be put down to the imaginary friend syndrome:

• A sense of God's love and presence. If this was imaginary though, I would generally expect to have more control over it. As it is, I generally cannot predict when this will happen. There are some situations in which it seems more likely, but sometimes I am disappointed and other times God seems to reveal himself quite unexpectedly.
  
• A sense of God's guidance - e.g. unexpected and surprising wisdom or insight into a difficult situation or problem. There are similar psychological phenomena which could potentially account for this - particularly the idea that the brain will sometimes process things sub-consciously then provide flashes of insight to the conscious mind.
  
• I've run out - I can't think of any more at the moment...

Some things I think are less easy to explain in this way:

• Knowledge or insight given to me into other people's situations which I knew nothing about - which has sometimes been very surprising to those concerned.
  
• Similar knowledge or insight given by others into my own situation. For example, being told by a complete stranger what I'd been praying about for the past few weeks (no-one else knew) and that my prayer would be answered (it was).
  
• Praying for people with various physical ailments and seeing them healed on a number of occasions. Most of these could be put down to co-incidence by a determined sceptic but for me they fit together with too many other things I've experienced and understand about God and the world and I'm afraid I'm just not that determined! A critic will of course ask why God doesn't heal every time a person is prayed for - but that's for another discussion...

So there you are - a few more reasons why I believe what I believe. I don't propose to provide details of any of the above. These are my experiences and are not for sceptics to pore over. As I've said elsewhere on this blog, if God wanted to prove Himself universally and indisputably, I believe He would have done so by now. The above are not meant to be testable or falsifiable by unbelieving sceptics - they are just some of the reasons why I personally have chosen to believe.

If you don't believe, I think you have 2 choices: Carry on not believing, or have a go at reaching out to God for yourself. If you're willing to try the second, in a spirit of honest humility, then you may just end up with some very good reasons of your own...

Resurrection

The Easter story, as most people know, centers around the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth - also known as the Messiah or "Christ".

This story is absolutely central to the Christian faith - to the extent that the apostle Paul famously wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:14 that, "if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith"!  Every now and again, another liberal-minded theologian seems to come out of the woodwork to suggest that Jesus' resurrection was not a literal, bodily resurrection, or was meant to be some kind of metaphor, but this is very clearly not what the early disciples and writers of scripture had in mind.

The resurrection - if true - is a mind-boggling event.  Everyone knows that people don't rise from the dead. We know it now, in the 21st century, but everyone knew it just as well back then.  When people die, they stay dead - especially if they've been crucified for several hours, skewered and then sealed up in a tomb!  What they don't do is get up, break the seal, roll the stone away and go for a walk.  It doesn't happen.  It doesn't require modern science or an enlightened 21st century mindset to work this out!  But nevertheless, according to the early disciples, this is exactly what Jesus did do and this remains the foundation stone of what has gone on to be the world's largest religion.  So either it was or has become an extremely convincing fraud, or it is - probably - the most monumentally groundbreaking event the world has ever known!

There have been many arguments - understandably - for and against the resurrection, and I'm not going to try and get into them all now (as if I knew them all anyway!), but to me the most convincing objective evidence seems to be the disciples themselves:

The 12 apostles all lived and travelled with Jesus for a period of more or less 3 years.  They had come to believe that he was the Messiah - the one who had come to save and deliver God's people from oppression.  What they thought this meant at this point is not exactly clear.  To begin with they presumably expected Jesus to lead the Jews to victory against the Romans but as time went on and they listened to Jesus' teaching it should have slowly become clear to them that his Kingdom was not going to work like that.  Whatever they expected though, all their hopes and dreams were invested in this man - who then went and got himself crucified!  They should have been devastated - indeed, according to the gospel accounts they were, at least to begin with - but then things changed rather dramatically.  Instead of just going back to their old lives, finding another saviour to follow, or perhaps even just trying to preserve his legacy - the disciples started preaching that Jesus had been raised from the dead!

Unless they truly believed it, this was a barefaced lie of enormous proportions!  Who was going to believe such nonsense - and what drove them to preach about it so powerfully?  Not only did they preach it though, with vigour and conviction, they were also able to convince thousands of others that it was true.  The New Testament book of Acts explains this unlikely set of events with reference to the Holy Spirit - the Spirit of God himself who empowered the early disciples to preach this message with such power that many seemed to find it irresistible, and to confirm its truth with all kinds of miraculous signs and wonders.  This is not an unreasonable explanation given how explosively the message seemed to spread in the face of all the odds and massive persecution and resistance.

Not only did the disciples devote their lives to preaching this message however, they were also willing to give up their lives for it - and many of them did so, dying gruesome and/or painful deaths as a result of anti-Christian persecution.

Could all of this really have happened off the back of a deluded fantasy, imagined or invented by a bunch of disillusioned followers of a dead Messiah?  Or is it just possible that what they say happened really did happen - that Jesus really was something special, and that he really did rise from the dead?  If it's true, then the rest of what they said is certainly worth listening to, and the rest of the world may turn out to be a very different place as a result!

Alien Jesus?

Earlier today I came across this article on the BBC News website.

It's another article speculating about a planet - this one only 20 light years away - that might have the right conditions to support life.  The article also speculates that there could be tens of billions of other habitable, or at least near habitable, planets within our galaxy - although of course even 20 light years is, for the foreseeable future, a long way out of our reach!

Is there life on other planets?  It's a fascinating question!  Even more though - is there sentient life?  As a Christian with an interest in Science Fiction and technology, I also sometimes wonder what theological implications this might have!

On one level, human beings are very similar to all the other animals on our planet.  We share something like 98.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, 75% with mice and 40% with some kinds of fish!  In evolutionary terms, the earth is our mother - it gave birth to us and sustains us.  Even if you believe in a literal interpretation of the Biblical creation story, we are made from "the dust of the ground".  On another level though, it's not hard to see that human beings are fundamentally distinct.  The ability we have to alter and exploit our environment - for good or ill - is just staggering compared to any other species (at least on earth anyway).  We're in a league of our own.

In Christian theology, human beings occupy a God-assigned place within creation - that of the "image bearer" (see  Genesis 1:26-28).  We are made in God's image (regardless of the process by which that may have happened) and are called to reflect that image to His creation - to rule it wisely on his behalf - whilst bringing out the best in it by our endeavours as an act of worship back to Him.  Because of our rebelliousness though, and our resulting estrangement from God, God became a man himself in Jesus, showing us how to live out our calling and making a way - through his self-giving love, sacrificial death and resurrection - for us and God to be reconciled.

And that's the gospel in a nutshell - although it could probably do with some unpacking!  But what does all this have to do with life on other planets?  Just this:  If God became a man on behalf of the image bearers (us), sacrificed his life and was resurrected for our salvation, where do other sentient life forms (if there are any) fit into this picture?

Are there other image bearers on other planets?  Did they also rebel or was it just us?  Did Jesus (or his many tentacled equivalent!) have to die many times on many other worlds?  Or are there many other sentient life forms still waiting to hear what Jesus has done?

Are we God's image bearers to the earth only, or to the whole Universe?  Is this calling peculiar to our species or will we one day have to share it with others?

My instinct is that this calling is unique and for that reason I don't expect to encounter sentient life on other worlds, though I would be amazed and fascinated if we did!  But then before Galileo we thought the earth was at the centre of the Universe and look how badly wrong we got that one...!

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!