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Faith and feminism: comrades or conflict? Part 1

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There was an interesting article in the Guardian last month showing that women that identified themselves as feminists were much less likely than women in general to identify themselves as belonging to a particular faith.  They were statistically more likely to identify as atheist or agnostic, and to be interested in female-centric paganism, or in alternative spirituality.

 

But the challenge put to me by feminist friends was how is it possible to be both feminist and Christian?  Or, as feminist writer Cath Elliott put it:

“Whether it’s one of the world’s major faiths or an off-the-wall cult, religion means one thing and one thing only for those women unfortunate enough to get caught up in it: oppression. It’s the patriarchy made manifest, male-dominated, set up by men to protect and perpetuate their power.”

So an attempt at answering that challenge.  There’s so much to say on this issue there may need to be more than one post…

1) Do we have a common understanding of what feminism is?
It is fairly clear that Cath Elliott believes that third wave feminists should have no truck with religion.  This is an old argument, and there’s pages of resources which gives an idea of how long the place of women in Christianity has been under debate.

But feminism is not itself a faith system with a common set of beliefs.  Wikipedia defines feminism as:

“a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women’s rights. Much of feminism deals specifically with the problems women face in overcoming social barriers, but some feminists argue that gender equality implies a necessary liberation of both men and women from traditional cultural roles, and look at the problems men face as well”.

So far so good, right?  So let’s look at the definition of Christian feminism.
Christian feminism does not mean being Sarah Palin.  I promise.  It is one of the feminist movements covered in the definition above and looks at the position of men and women from a slightly different starting point, not just as individual units but as beings that find happiness in their relations with others, inherently equal but undeniably different, and that understanding this equality before God is essential to understanding our place in the world.

Essentially, as Helen LaKelly Hunt puts it, faith and feminism are “really different expressions of the same impulse to make life more whole“.
I don’t see these two approaches as being in conflict either, I don’t think Christian Feminism is an oxymoron, and I’ll attempt to explain why below.

2) “All religions oppress women”
This is the first challenge.  I can’t pretend to answer for all faiths – I’m a committed Christian and while I’ve looked at the other faiths because I’m interested in knowing more about what others believe, I can only answer as to why I don’t feel oppressed.

In many ways, the Christian faith as led by the church defines patriarchy. Indeed, the orthodox churches refer to their leaders as patriarchs!  But I’d argue that this was a reflection of the political period in which those structures developed rather than something naturally inherent in the message of Jesus Christ.

The slight cop-out answer, for me, comes from the fact of me being a protestant.  For me, the key is that Christianity is a relationship with God and not a religion.
The ceremonies, the churches’ structures, the stuff that is effectively man-made attempts to impose order – that’s religion.  I can see why you could criticise that.
We have women in leadership roles in my church, and I made the case for female bishops in a previous post and so I respect, but disagree with, the thoughtful considerations of other Christians that conclude that they do not believe there is a bible-based case for women in church leadership.  The message throughout the bible is that God created a perfect world, but that we humans use the free will he gave us and screw it up while he sends prophets and eventually his own son to try to help us get back on track.  I’d suggest that just possibly exclusion of women from positions of leadership in the church may be an element of that?

3) “The Christian message and the Feminist message are fundamentally incompatible”
The Christian message is simply this: we all try to be good.
But we do bad things.  Christians call it sin.
We reason with ourselves that probably most of them are not so bad, but these things separate us from God, who is all good and who cannot tolerate sin.
The price of this sin? Death – eternal separation from all goodness.
But it’s ok – God loves us and wants us to be happy with him.
So Jesus bridges the gap – he died when he didn’t deserve to and paid the price for all of us.  Accept that offer of Jesus, and be happy with God as he intended us to be, living in his kingdom.

Nowhere in that is there an exhortation to treat women as lesser beings.  Nowhere does it say that this is a message for men not women, that women are not equally called upon to be forgiven their sins and help make the world a better place.
So where’s the incompatibility?

I think this slightly depends on what you think the feminist message is.  For me, equality is at the heart of feminism: political, social and economic.  If, for you, the main thread is about sexual freedom, then you will see incompatibility.
But equality is also there in Christianity: equal access to all spiritual blessings through Jesus.
Throughout the bible it is the people that treat women as inferiors, not God.
God’s angels address women directly just as they do men, and when women are in a position to make a difference, while some are consorts like Esther, you also find queens in their own right like Deborah.
Jesus’s attitude to women was truly counter-cultural – we have forgotten just how shocking even talking to a woman publicly was.
And God used the women at the heart of Jesus’s group of followers for one of the most important roles at Easter – it was the women that found that Jesus was gone from and who came to tell the others, this critical role played by women at a time when in the temple courts a woman’s testimony counted for nothing (“Sooner let the words of the Law be burnt than delivered to women” (Talmud, Sotah 19a)).
So equality before God?  Yes, it’s spelt out in the New Testament: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

And yet there is a conflict.  Jesus’s model for changing the world was that of serving others, serving God.
We can talk about rights, demand respect, argue about fairness, protest about a lack of political and business representation, but ultimately in a perfect world everyone, male and female, would seek the best way to serve each other rather than put each other down and get one over each other.  That’s real equality.
For me, feminism is a stepping stone in this imperfect society to build something a little closer to this, to help us to do the right thing.

Next time: sex, and women in society…

Questions of faith in adversity

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Over on Facebook a friend from church had posted this video in which Martin Bashir (he of the Diana and Michael Jackson interviews in the 1990s who has all but disappeared from UK TV screens) interviews Rob Bell, pastor, author of “Velvet Elvis” and a controversial new book “Love Wins: a book about heaven, hell and the fate of every person who ever lived” as it is known in the USA or “Love Wins: at the heart of life’s big questions” in the UK.

Ignoring the YouTube titling (Rob Bell does not squirm), the interview asks two important questions that beg further examination.
1) How can there be a God worth worshipping if he allows the sort of suffering we’re seeing in Japan?
2) Is Rob Bell sanitising Christianity’s message for modern tastes by suggesting that there’s every chance that God’s love will win people over after death?

On the first question, every time there is a huge tragedy that we cannot understand, Christians are challenged in this way:
Is God not powerful and therefore not able to intervene to save people from the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Christchurch earthquake in NZ, or the current Japan earthquake/tsunami/ nuclear radiation combination that has so far left half a million homeless, reportedly killed tens of thousands in minutes and destabilized nuclear power plants leading both to fears of radiation poisoning and fuel and power shortages?
Or, if we believe he is powerful enough to act, does he simply not care enough to do so?

This is not an easy thing to answer, particularly in the face of so much pain and suffering. Rob Bell’s answer – that God sheds a tear when we do was succinct, but not the whole picture.
And it is an old, old question. It is set out in the story of Job in the Old Testament – if God cares why doesn’t he DO something?

At the time of Job of course, given he was a good man and could not be blamed as his friends tried to for not being good enough or faithful enough, the only answer was to have God say did you make the world? Can you pretend to understand the how or why or rhyme or reason of the universe I’ve created? Trust that I have a plan only you can’t see the whole of it.
Christians have an additional answer, given Jesus is risen. The only answer I’ve seen that makes any sense is that of course he cares, so much he put himself as Jesus through one of the most horrible deaths imaginable. While this was for all of us so that our sins don’t separate us from God, it also means that the pain of losing a loved one horribly is a firsthand experience for God too.
So we pray, and there are many miracles even in the post-tsunami horror, but the world is not as God intended it to be. If he intervened on everything everywhere all the time we’d be no better than puppets with no free will to show that we’re worthy of the amazing life and gifts that he’s given us. So its our responsibility as his people to bring the comfort and support to others that we get from Jesus paying the price for our sin.

As for the second question, Rob Bell is being presented as a blasphemer in the press. To some degree Martin Bashir is right, if Bell is presenting a message of actually it doesn’t matter what anyone has believed in or done in life, even after death you still have a chance to be won over by God’s love then that is very much in tune with the anything goes modern world.
It’s also something called universalism, the idea that eventually all humans can or will be saved by Jesus and come to harmony in God’s Kingdom.

As ever, the presentation of Bell’s book in the press is a bit simplistic, the true picture looks to be far more interesting and the book worth reading. Belief.net has a neat little article on this, as well as a fantastic blogging columnist who has reviewed the book.
I’m summarising the four key points here:
1) Eternal life starts here on earth now – bringing about all the things we believe embody God’s Kingdom around us on earth (peace, love, health, comforting);
2) Love has to be free – we can choose to love, or not to, to be with God who is love or to separate ourselves from that;
3) Jesus was not plan B, he was always God’s plan to reconcile our fractured world with his perfection;
4) In paying the price for our sin, Jesus gives us all the chance of a fresh start, good news for everyone who ever was, is and will be. The Good News is that Love Wins.

The idea that God really does love everyone is surely the best news ever.  But is the idea that everyone will eventually choose him, even if its not in this life now, just a bit patronising towards those of other faiths or none who may have chosen their beliefs after learning out about the other ideas out there?
That said, you can’t help but admire Bell’s timing.  There must be millions of people out there who hope against hope that those swept away by the tsunami who had not heard about Jesus or who had not accepted his offer will still have the chance to find him.  I’m sure the book will be popular.
Maybe I will read this book – after all I loved the stream of consciousness approach of Velvet Elvis. But I might do so with my big book of Christian theology with me.
And will still pray for the people of Japan. You can donate to the Red Cross to help Japan here , or via Save the Children here.

SKYLINE or oh God, earth loses to the aliens

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It’s not often I am moved to write a film review, but I had a chance to see a lot of films over Christmas what with all the flight time I racked up…

I saw lots of films I enjoyed (principally, it has to be admitted, cartoons as I was sitting next to my toddler and couldn’t watch things with too high a rating).
“Scott Pilgrim vs the World” was sublime, laugh out loud funny and so clever.
“The Social Network” is worth the Oscar nominations.
“Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang” was make-you-cry feelgood at the end.
I want a “Despicable Me” minion.
My reaction to “Avatar” was “meh!” but I expect it is suboptimal on an aeroplane seat-sized screen rather than a giant 3D screen…

But the film I want to review is “Skyline“.
This $10m  alien invasion film (i.e. made for peanuts and with no big star – often the sort of film-making I like…) is the one that has affected me most, and mainly because I hated it.

I don’t mean I disliked it, or found it boring.  I actually hated it.

This is a bleak, doom-laden and ultimately depressing film.  It is impossible to write about it without spoilers, so consider yourselves warned…

We start in an apartment where a group of hungover friends are waking up.  One girl gets up and is sick – it is later established that she is pregnant.  Everyone is transfixed by a blue light – it’s so pretty, no one can resist looking.  But then it starts to suck them in…
And then we’re off into full-on alien invasion mode.
These alien things suck in everyone and come in varying sizes meaning they can get into houses or crush entire apartment blocks.
It has been pointed out in other reviews that the black character dies first – yes, and the character cheats on his girlfriend too as if that somehow makes it ok that he died, in comparison with the hero/ heroine couple who are going to have a baby.
The US airforce sends in a nuclear bomb – boom!
But the aliens are not destroyed and the havesting continues. Our heroes continue, despite radiation poisoning, to try to figure out a way to survive, but ultimately are taken by the alien harvesters.
But that’s not the end.
Ultimately everyone in the world is taken, alive, on board the alien ship, where their heads are ripped off and their still living brains used, Doctor Who Cyberman-style, to power new alien beings.
I’ll leave a mystery over the exact fate of the newly pregnant heroine and the hero, but suffice to say the only way of making a sequel is if the heroine survived nine months of pregnancy in alien hell and the foetus grows up to invent time travel and stop it happening.

And that, if you like, is my problem.  To me, there was no proper ending, just unending horror.
Some reviewers have praised this as “realistic”, or “refreshingly free from cheesy Hollywood feelgood”.

To me, it was evidence to me of how important it is to me to know that there after apocalypse there is redemption.
The longing for a happy ending is hard-wired into our society.  We want to know that wrongs will be righted, the evil to be punished and the good to be rewarded (even if we disagree on when, how and what exactly we mean by those concepts).
In the Strause brothers’ vision of the apocalypse there is no judgement, no fairness, no ultimate purpose to life.
Humankind has no value other than as fuel, and lives on only as the brainpower of another species.  And it is better – as demonstrated by the fat, bossy man (fat? Yep, in filmworld if he’s not funny, he’s going to die), to kill yourself than to be taken.  What kind of a world view is it where suicide is the best option?

Ultimately, in that vision of the world, there is no God.
Well, unless it is a vision of what happens during the book of Revelation, before all the 7-horned cows and whore of Babylon stuff.
But I don’t think He’s there in this story.  I don’t think he was even an afterthought.  This is an apocalypse with a nihilistic world view and a simple message.  We all die.  Earth loses to the aliens.

To people who think that religion is a crutch for those who need a fluffy bunny version of the world, I suggest you’ve not read Revelations – all those years of dreadful things happening that are mentioned there, and they don’t spell out clearly that believers will be spared from all the horrors.
(Well, pretribulationist Christians think it does, with the rapture lifting them up to meet Christ before it all kicks off, but that’s not the most commonly held position – and an atheist website offering to look after the pets of Christians taken away in the rapture neatly satirises this…).

The world of St John the Divine’s book of Revelation is not a cosy place.
Some have suggested that it has more than a touch of the magic mushroom about it.
Frankly, even if it’s an allegorical description, the sort of world described is all the worst of the world around us until the new heaven and the new earth.

But – and draw a deep breath – given I believe that Jesus is coming back, then I would still rather that the vision there is as it will be than subscribe to the world view that is so neatly encapsulated by “Skyline”.

But it’s not 0 stars for “Skyline”, it’s 1 star, and that’s because it made me think.

Who knew about Christmas?

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People have been wondering about Jesus and whether he was who he said he was (the Messiah), and did what he said he did (died for us, and rose again, to put us right with God), for more than two thousand years now – and millions have attempted to answer.

So how are we supposed to know?  Well, I’m leading at this weeks women’s home group, and we’re looking at the prophesies that Jesus fulfilled, starting with the ones relating to Christmas.

For me, faith-wise Christmas has never been as important to me as Easter, I mean, the rituals associated with an English Christmas are fabulous, but my faith does not hinge on the virgin birth and birth location of Bethlehem in the same way that it does on the crucifixion and resurrection.
And as a student of history and literature, I’m always sceptical about the accuracy of documents and the possibility of retrofitting to gloss over inconvenient details that don’t quite fit. Can we trust the source material?*
So looking at the Messiah prophesies for Christmas is a genuine journey of discovery, and not something I intend to just blindly accept.
However, after quite a lot of research I owe a great deal of thanks to “Answers to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask About the Christian Faith” by Josh McDowell and Don Stewart (Tyndale House Publishers, 1980) as well as the various largely anonymous internet evangelists of all faiths and none.

Prophecy means a revelation from God, or “prediction of the future, made under divine inspiration”.  There are about 300 prophesies in the Old Testament, written between 1450 BC and 430 BC,  relating to an anointed one (the Hebrew word is Messiah).   According to Clarifying Christianity, readers of the texts in the ancient world knew that the Messiah:

would arrive in their future. The Messiah would “deliver” or “save” all the Jewish people, bringing them to paradise or heaven. These prophecies also stated that the Messiah would save all the other people in the world “through the Jews.” For this reason, people who are not Jewish need to learn about the Messiah, too”.

It’s worth noting that not everyone believes that the prohpesies were fulfilled by Jesus.  In fact, the religious leaders at the time said “woe to us, for the sceptre has been removed and the Messiah has not come!” (from the Talmud of the Babylon, Sanhedrin).

But the specific predictions that seem to relate to Jesus include the timing of his birth (before the Jewish people lost their sovereign power to the Romans when Archelaus took the throne of Israel; that he would be born in Bethlehem (a little insignificant place according to Micah 5:2) and that he would be born  to a virgin.  Eve was told that her descendant’s heel would be bitten by the serpent but that the serpent’s head would be crushed (Genesis 3:15). A child would be born “to us”: a wonderful counsellor, mighty God, eternal father, prince of peace (Isaiah 7: 10-16) – the now familiar words which must surely have seemed blasphemous. He would be born in Bethlehem to be a ruler in Israel, and to be the Ancient of Days (Micah 5:2) – a figure from the book of Daniel (Daniel 7:9, 13).  His coming would cause a massacre of Bethlehem’s children (Jeremiah 31:15).  He would travel to Egypt (Hosea 11:1), would live in Galilee (Isaiah 9:1) and Nazareth (Isaiah 11:1), he would be from the family of Israel’s great King David (2 Samuel 7:12-16, Psalms 89:3-4, Isaiah 9: 6-7); he would be announced by a herald (Isaiah 40:3, Malachi 3:1, 4:5), that his mission would include the gentiles (Isaiah 42: 1-4) and that his ministry would be one of healing (Isaiah 53:4).

I’m going to look particularly at Isaiah 7:14-16, Isaiah 9:1-8, Isaiah 40: 1-10 and Micah 5:2.

1) Born of a virgin (Isaiah 7: 13-16)

Isaiah was a prophet who lived between about 742BC and 722BC, in the kingdom of Judah, the southern part of Israel.  This was his first prophecy. The kingdom was under threat of invasion by the Assyrians (Rezin, King of Aram) and northern Israel had already signed an alliance to protect itself (King Pekah choosing to attack Judah in preference to being defeated by Assyria).  Isaiah’s message was that King Ahaz should avoid all entanglements with foreign powers, but the King did not want to hear it, nor would he agree to put God to the test.  He did not want to see God’s advice on what to do because he was afraid of the answer he might hear.  Despite all this, Isaiah delivered a message of comfort, reassurance, and of hope to come – any immediate ruination would eventually be undone, and nothing would be left of their attackers in just 65 years.

At first glance, there seems to be two key points of this passage: the virgin being with child, and that her son will be called “Immanuel”.
God was giving the sign King Ahaz needed, but not just for him but for all his descendants too.  And while some people thought that Isaiah’s own second son who was born soon afterwards would be the child to fulfil the prophecy, he was not virgin-born, nor did Isaiah name him Immanuel.
But that’s not Jesus’s name either (and actually Jesus appears to be a corruption of the name Yeshua!)   Immanuel means God with us – his nature and role rather than his specific name.  He is described as having to learn to take the good and refuse the evil – something Jesus clearly does in the desert…

But a virgin birth?  Protestant Christians and Muslims believe that this means a birth without male involvement – Roman Catholics and some Orthodox Christians believe this means that Mary remained a virgin even after giving birth. The virgin birth appears in both the gospels of Matthew and Luke.  There are a number of interesting questions – did Isaiah’s prophesy mean “young woman” or “woman who has never had sex” (NB both of these terms are used to describe Rebecca in the Old Testament)?  Was the birth of Jesus as written down based on the attestation of Mary and Joseph, or added by the authors of the gospels who were already aware of the Messiah prophesies?  Is it an allegory, comparable to that of God and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden?  Is it simply following the pattern in the Old Testament of having miraculous births for prophets – just like the Pharaohs and Gods of the ancient world?  Were there anti-Jesus stories questioning his parentage at around the time that Matthew and Luke were written that they were addressing?  Paul’s writings can be interpreted as supporting either case.

According to “Answers to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask About the Christian Faith“:

The Bible teaches that the Word who became flesh was with God from the beginning (John 1:1). The fact of the pre-existence of Christ is testified many times in the New Testament (John 8:58, Philipians 2:5–11, Colossians 1:15, 16).
When Jesus came into the world, he was not a newly created individual such as we are, but was the eternal Son of God. To be born into this world of the virgin Mary required divine intervention, and this is exactly what the Gospels record.
Another reason why Jesus needed to be virgin-born was because of His sinless nature. A basic New Testament teaching is that from the day He was born until the day He died, Jesus was without sin. To be a perfect sacrifice, He must Himself be perfect — without sin. Since our race is contaminated with sin, a miraculous entrance into the world would be required, hence the virgin birth.Moreover, if Jesus had been sired by Joseph, He would not have been able to claim legal rights to the throne of David. According to the prophecy of Jeremiah 22:28–30, there could be no king in Israel who was a descendant of King Jeconiah, and Matthew 1:12 relates that Joseph was from the line of Jeconiah. If Jesus had been fathered by Joseph, He could not rightly inherit the throne of David, since he was a relative of the cursed line.

2) Unto us a child is born (Isaiah 9:1-8)
So familiar from the Eleven Lessons and Carols “the people that walk in darkness have seen a great light”.
The prohetic language muddles the past, present and future.
The people referred to were two of the twelve tribes of Israel, but were only singled out as they had received the worst treatment from the Jewish inhabitants of the lands ruled by the king of Assyria (Israel and Judah), who was initially tolerant, but then rooted them out,and by Shalmaneser who captured Somalia and carried Israel into captivity. But hope was coming – in Galilee (which included a Gentile area in its north). The people had done nothing specific to bring this complete change of situation – it was to be God’s free gift.
Darkness means all the bad things they did as well as the misfortune in which they lived, as well as the feeling of being prisoners in a foreign land.
The multiplied nation was both Jews and Gentiles. A yoke was a heavy wooden frame to help carry a burden, the staff and the rod were for enforcing the burden carrying – God destroyed the weight of the burden through the Messiah, and in the fires, as effectively as he’d destroyed the Midianites with just 300 men. The biggest positive was that God appointed Gideon (a very unlikely hero) to free them (Isaiah seems to have been very affected by this and mentions it twice more!).

The child “born to us” that Isaiah speaks of, for Christians is clearly Jesus.  Being born as a child illustrates the humanity of the son of God.  But Jewish people at the time of Isaiah and Micah said that the description referred to Hezekiah, the then King of Israel. Although known as great and good, it seems odd that “Mighty God” could be ascribed to Hezekiah without claims of blasphemy!  God promised David the throne forever, but while Hezekiah managed it for about 29 years, in Jesus that is fulfilled.

3) Comfort for God’s people (Isaiah 40:1-10)

This passage seems to foreshadow John the Baptist. John the Baptist was in the wilderness, like the ancient custom of princes to send who sent pioneers  to prepare the way that they were to go (actually we still do this now).
“Comfort, O comfort My people,” says your God…. that (their) iniquity has been removed…” (Isaiah 40:1,2). God is holy, pure and righteous. There must be payment made for our sin or we are lost. Jesus sacrificed Himself to atone for our sins. He became “the way” back to the Father (John 14:6).  God forgives on His terms, not ours. To reject the gospel is to reject God’s forgiveness. Man may try to reinvent a God who forgives through other means than faith in Christ, but in truth there is no other way (Acts 4:12; Acts 3:37,38).

4) Being born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2)

So why Bethlehem?  Why not Jerusalem, the holy city?
The location of the messiah’s birth was prophesied by Micah.  Like Isaiah, Micah was a prophet during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, roughly 737–690 BC.  He’s considered one of the minor prophets, speaking out against the greed of the wealthy classes who grew rich by breaking the Jewish people’s Covenant with God.  He prophesied the return of the great ruler from Bethlehem and the peace that would come from this.

Matthew has the star (Numbers 24:17) stop in Bethlehem – not possible given the  distance of the stars, but possible if the sky worked like the ancients believed, with a firmament in which the stars hung.
Luke has a census require Joseph take his heavily pregnant wife hundreds of miles to register, at the Emperor Augustus’s request, in the town of his ancestor – possibly a misunderstanding of the scale or nature of census taking before 74AD by Vespasian and Titus.  But he was a historian – it seems unlikely he’d've mentioned a journey to Bethlehem unless something else had also mentioned it.

But while the line of David would be of no interest to the Romans, but the Romans would have left it up to the leadership of the regions to carry out the census. It is clear from various verses that Jewish customs were taken seriously when conducting Roman affairs. Pontious Pilate released a prisoner on the Passover, Herod was king & was an Edomite (from Esau) and did many things to please the Romans and the Jews to get what he wanted, there was still Jewish currency for temple and Roman currency for tax (e.g. Jewish currency wasn’t completely outlawed). So, although the Romans wouldn’t have cared about the line of David, the leadership would have probably used their knowledge of Jewish customs and culture to help run things as smoothly as possible.

By contrast, Matthew just seems to have the holy family living in Bethlehem for a bit.

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Ultimately, as someone put it to me “it doesn’t matter whether the snake talked, it’s what it said that matters”.

There are lots of people who claimed to be the Messiah or prophets – Jesus himself points this out (Matthew 7:15; Matthew 24:11; Matthew 24:23-25; Mark 13:21-23). But none of them fulfil even a fraction of the prophecies that Jesus did.
Fulfilling many of the prophecies is not something that an individual that can arrange for themselves, in advance.

And when neither John (the last gospel) nor Mark (the first gospel) mention the birth of Jesus at all – his mission and death being the main issues for believers and entirely in keeping with both Jewish traditional scripture style and explanation of the Jewish Messiah via the Greco-Roman tradition.

A merry Christmas to you all.

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*= Footnote:
When it comes to dating the New Testament books (our primary source of information about Christ), there are differences between conservative and liberal scholars but only in terms of decades, not centuries. For example, the conservative dating for the Gospel of Mark is between A.D. 50-60, with more liberal scholars placing it around A.D. 70. This is remarkable, when you consider that Jesus died somewhere around the year A.D. 30; these are authentic eyewitness accounts. Generally speaking, Paul’s letters were written between A.D. 50-66, the gospels between A.D. 50-70, with John’s gospel being written sometime around A.D. 80-90. If you can believe it, we actually have a fragment of John’s gospel dated just after the end of the first century.To discover the accuracy of copying for the New Testament material and see whether or not it has been “changed,” you have to look at two factors: One, the number of manuscripts existing today; and two, the time period between the original document and the earliest manuscripts still in existence today. The more manuscripts we have and the closer the manuscripts are to the original, the more we are able to determine where copyist errors happened and which copies reflect the original.

For example, the book Natural History, written by Pliny Secundus, has 7 manuscript copies with a 750-year gap between the earliest copy and the original text. The number two book in all of history in manuscript authority is The Iliad, written by Homer, which has 643 copies with a 400-year gap.

Now this is a little startling: the New Testament has currently 24,970 manuscript copies, completely towering over all other works of antiquity. In addition, we have one fragment of the New Testament (NT) with only a 50-year gap from the original, whole books with only a 100-year gap, and the whole NT with only a 225-250-year gap. I don’t think there is any question from all of these early copies that we know exactly what the original documents said.

Re-Hawking an old idea

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Did the universe as we know it merely come into being by itself from a quantum-level change in an existing one?

I’ve been putting off blogging about Stephen Hawking and God.  Mainly this is because I feel that the latest pronouncements splashed across the front page of the Times last week (no link as I don’t want you to have to pay News Corp a pound to read it) were more about stirring controversy to increase book sales than any new ideas on where and how God “fits in” with the universe.

Of course, by ignoring the story for a while I’ve been able to read a lot of the excellent and not so excellent commentary.  The Church Mouse blog was among the best of the religious responses, pointing out that:

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn’t prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary. [Stephen W. Hawking, Der Spiegel, 1989]

Compare the quote from 1989 with the one which has caused the headlines today:

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

If anyone can spot a difference, please let Mouse know.

To those of us that are sci fi fans, the multiworlds model which Hawking cited alongside laws such as gravity as making God “unnecessary” is familiar.  Basically the idea is that for every “decision” at a quantum level, a parallel universe is created in which the other “decision” was taken.

It features in Doctor Who – not just in the obvious case of “Pete’s World” where the cybermen come from, but also in multiple explanations of things going on (Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant’s doctors both use it as an explanation – the tenth doctor refers to it in the episode “School Reunion”).  Terry Pratchett’s famous “trousers of time” is another example this theory being used in a really understandable manner.

I’m not going to take on Hawking on the physics.  As the Church Mouse says: “if you try to claim you know more about the science of creation and the big bang you will instantly make yourself a laughing stock.  And nothing that Hawking has said rules out the possibility of God“.
It is that latter part that I think merits a bit more thought.

Of course, if it is taking the decision (consciously or quantum-ly) that creates the new world, then Hawking has a point – it does indicate that a creator god would not be needed to make each parallel world just pop into existence – infinite, multiple worlds spinning off through all time and space of a multiverse.  And getting your head around this is not easy. It slightly makes me think of another Terry Pratchett quote: “Nothing good ever follows the word multiple” (Guards! Guards!)

The responses from the religious community, at least the less fundamentalist parts of it, has been relatively measured.  Most follow the Church Mouse’s rule.  Most also pointed out that while theories of how the universe came into being were interesting, they did nothing to answer the fundamental question of “why” it came into being.
The Daily Mail (I know, rare for me to comment on their more sober reporting) quoted:

Dr Williams said: ‘Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the universe.’

He told The Times: ‘It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence. Physics on its own will not settle the question of why there is something rather than nothing.’

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales and one of Britain’s top imams also joined the condemnation. Lord Sacks said: ‘Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation… The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the universe came into being.’

And the apparent head of the religion of atheism, Richard Dawkins, was quick to embrace Hawking as one of his kind of people.  Many comments abounded in the blogosphere, probably not direct from the man himself, saying that just as evolution left no space for God in biology, Hawking left no space for God in physics.

Dawkins did say in the Times that asking “why?” was nonsensical and that “stupid questions” did not deserve to get answers.

Interesting – the entire spirit of scientific inquiry is on the basis of asking “why” such-and-such is and trying to find the mechanics behind it.
Ah, but then this is metaphysics, not physics, and because it is unprovable and therefore cannot be tested by scientific means, the question is outside the self-defined belief system that says that science is all, and therefore not a valid one…
Um, am I alone in thinking that Dawkins’ atheism is not just about following Darwin’s principles but fast becoming a science-based faith in its own right…

“God is a delusion. … Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand.” (Introduction to “The God Delusion”).

(another tenet of this belief: knowledge at present is ok until a better theory is available and a theory to explain each thing and everything will eventually be found)?

But I digress.
If what you believe in is a “God of the Gaps“, that God is the explanation until each gap is filled in with a plausible scientific explanation, then perhaps Hawking’s bid to increase his book sales is problematic.But it seems to me that the answer “it can and inevitably does create itself” is unsatisfactory.  From what?  Where did those things come from?

By answering the question of where did everything come from with what seems to be “it has always been something”, we are essentially opening ourselves up to a broader question: yes, the universe as we know it may be the inevitable result from a decision taken somewhere in a parallel universe probably at a quantum level and therefore may have been spontaneously created but how did it all get going in the first place?
After all our observations are that there are patterns of apparently infinite complexity (such as never-ending fractals) but is it reasonable to conclude that they have just “always been” or “just are”?
We’re trying to answer the idea that “something came from nothing” (ex nihilo creation) by saying that what we have always thought of as the beginning point isn’t.  So where did what spontaneously created itself come from?
God is of course the Occam’s Razor explanation for all of this…
But now I’m in danger of straying into the territory that the Church Mouse wisely recommended steering clear of…

So where do we go from here?As I’ve said in previous posts where we go from here comes back to the person of Jesus – if he was who he said he was, and did what we think he did, then all of this discussion is so much ephemera, an interesting diversion on God’s tools when we should be living better, supporting the poor and needy and building our relationship with God through prayer, praise and celebration.
The bible does not use scientific language or mathematics to describe how God made everything, and does not take a view on cosmology, life on other planets (all God’s children too?) etc. etc.
We shouldn’t expected it to- it is after all primarily the story and user’s manual for God’s relationship with his chosen people that turns out to be all of us – and Jesus seems to have had more personal, pressing priorities to communicate concerning something that Richard Dawkins does not actually believe exists: our souls.

A final thought: in other scientific spheres, the ideas of science fiction have so captured the imagination that we have Star Trek communicators in our pockets, and I look forward to the pain-free instant surgical laser of Star Trek: The Next Generation or any of the time travel or teleportation devices we see (but note the warnings on these technologies that sci fi also holds…).
Ideas of good science fiction always inspire, helping us to find the room to adapt for usefulness and become science-fact.
But I’m afraid most of us will have no idea what Professor Hawking’s maths equations that show the possibility of the multiverse that leaves no space for God actually mean and whether he’s right, and I’m struggling to see how they can be adapted for the good of everything except for further development of scientific atheism’s faith position.  But perhaps that’s not the point.
But then, to paraphrase the Times editorial, if we were to know “how God did it”, Stephen Hawking is one of the very few people on earth that would understand how it was done.

Good night, and God bless

Lent – not just a past participle…

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image from freefoto.com

Embarrassing incident at work today. 

As I walked through reception I saw a colleague I barely know with a dirty mark on her forehead.  I thought about telling her, but decided as she was about to get into a mirrored lift that she’d see it herself in good time. 

But when I got back upstairs, I saw another colleague with a mark and said “ok, I’ve missed something, what’s the mark about?”

“It’s Ash Wednesday”, said my colleague.
Of course it is. What a fool I felt.

I made pancakes last night for Shrove Tuesday (embarrassingly good since they were made from a Betty Crocker instant batter shaker, and it made me wonder why I’d bothered making them by hand so many years). 
I won my only real school prize for Scripture, writing an essay on the origins and meaning of pancake day (see this post for more detail).  As they said on the TV news yesterday, we’re all so used to thinking about pancakes and live in such a relatively prosperous and increasingly secular society that we’re forgetting that they symbolise something.

But the ash marks reminded me that not everyone’s forgetting. 
My colleague mentioned the services that were taking place at Westminster Cathedral and asked me if I too was Roman Catholic, to which I replied no, C of E, and that I’ve not seen that for years (the universal tradition is to burn last year’s palm crosses from Palm Sunday to make the ash, which in itself is a symbolic act).
She suggested looking up the Westminster Abbey website to see if my denomination was doing it too, which was kind of her.  One thing about working on equalities issues is that – far from the way that we see equalities described as being about the sweeping away and secularisation of society – it’s about celebrating and recognising our diversity and that that’s what makes life interesting.

But it reminds me of a conversation with a friend last week.  We talked about giving things up for Lent and how hard it was this year (I’m trying to give up fruitless worrying about the future, she’s giving up alcohol).  Both are small, commemorative acts of personal use rather than big dramatic acts clearly visible to all.

She mentioned that her parents were unlikely to consider what she’d given up “enough”, but she hoped that it would be understood and would not be held against her getting a pass to heaven.
I’ve pondered this last point, because its on this precise issue that we pass for the cultural to the spiritual and a small but significant difference of view.
It’s easy to forget what is cultural (rememberance of the 40 days in the wilderness) with what is spiritually necessary (that is acceptance of Jesus’s gift to us, God’s forgiveness, that the price of our sin has been paid and God’s law fulfilled). It’s not about trying to fulfil a standard – Jesus’s whole message was effectively that this is pointless as no one on their own merit will ever be good enough to meet God’s perfection.
We’ve seen this reflected in so much of religion, both within Christianity and in other faiths, the hope that by setting rules that must be obeyed you’ll be more what God is looking for, or trying to buy your way in to God’s good books through good behaviour. And of course we know that rules that set out to help can become a hindrance by being too hard to meet or becoming the aim themselves rather than the glory of God. 
Christians know from Jesus that nothing they do will be good enough, that it’s faith in Jesus (known as justification by faith) but even then the issue is complicated, with James 2:24 in the New Testament the point being made is that what you believe modifies your actions. As wikipedia sets out unusually clearly, true faith in God results in a desire to follow his instruction to love one another, and thus would result in good deeds.  But that’s difficult to get your head round – resulting in many heretical positions down the centuries.

Lent reminds us of a hardship endured, and ultimately a sacrifice made for us. It reminds us to lend part of our thoughts to this, for this short period (the classic 40 days to Easter).
But Lent is not just the past participle of “to lend”, it’s a real thing affecting the way in which millions of people in the UK live their lives (and with larger population for C&E Europe, possibly a growing number).  We may not have the parading in sackcloth and ashes of the mediaeval world but the connotations of fasting and repentance (conveyed by lack of decoration in church) and regarding the world a little more contemplatively do echo on.  Typically we’ve hung onto the fun of the pancaking feasting which the population forgets the follow-up fasting.

But the echoes are now rebounding more loudly.  Combined with increasing willingness to show religious faith publicly, whether wearing headscarf , turban, skullcap or cross, even if there are consequences because to those doing it it’s a mark of what is important in their lives. The ash marks are both traditional and the latest manifestation of this. Yes they are symbols, the symbol of the thing rather than the thing itself, but symbols matter.

Let’s think about it, while we digest.

Advent thoughts: if it’s good enough for Africa…

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Candle-Lanterns-5812_imageImage from http://www.lightalantern.co.za/about-candle-lanterns.asp

While searching the web for something this morning I was really surprised to find this thought-provoking article by Matthew Parris on the importance of faith in liberating Africa (especially surpised as I was looking for a Giles Coren piece on an obesity tax…).  I know it’s a year old and probably done to death in commentaries last year, but reading it I really wanted a chance to talk about it.
Here’s an extract:

But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

In many ways this article is beautiful:  while the activities of aid workers and NGOs are important, only the actions of the missionaries bring a change in the heart, standing tall, liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world, a directness in their dealings with others.  Parris puts this down to:

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

In other words, Christianity as practised by the missionaries (and indeed the non-proselytizing aid workers) gives a sense of self to the believer, enabling and empowering rather than enslaving and cowing.  This is culturally at odds with many of the community actions and tribal religions that are in place and the difference in attitude of new Christians is amazing and, Parris seems to imply, better this way of encouraging self-belief and modernisation than the alternatives that are out there.

This is interesting from two perspectives, which make the article a bit less beautiful…
1) As an atheist, is it patronising for Parris to suggest that Christianity is a good for Africans for getting beyond tribal beliefs in Africa, given that he doesn’t actually think it’s true?
Or is truth only of concern once you are modernised?

2) If Christianity has such amazing uplifting properties that are good for the people of Africa, giving a sense of self-worth built on a direct relationship between God and man, could it not be that those are exactly the things that we are missing and in need of here in the western world too?
Or does it not matter for us because we’ve already modernised and grown beyond such superstitions?

I don’t have any answers.  I suspect only Matthew Parris really knows what he was getting at, and he admits that what he sees is incompatible with or inexplicable by his new world view. 

For me, the idea that Christianity is a helpful stepping stone but not ultimately true is close to the Marx/ Engels “religion is the opiate of the masses“ approach to life – an illusory happiness which can be set aside in order that they find “real” happiness. 
According to the rather fabulous Marx exhibition at the Karl Marx Haus in Trier, Marx had an exceptionally unhappy life, had a child with his housekeeper and two of his children commited suicide – so I’d be pretty clear that whatever this alternative source of happiness he was seeking, he didn’t find it. 
I wonder why this element of Marxist thought is not as discredited in the popular mind as the rest of communism?  (Incidentally, I maintain that we’ve not actually seen a real Marxist communist society yet – except perhaps early Christian communities:

“And all that believed were together, and had all things common; 45 And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. 46 And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, 47 Praising God, and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.” (Acts 2:44-47) )

But there is another perspective.  Perhaps Christianity lifts and inspires because it is true.
 
Christianity is undergoing a real boom in Africa not just because of the sense of self that a direct relationship with Jesus inspires but because what Jesus did, the society that he lived in, these things speak directly to many people in Africa in a way that we in the developed world have forgotten.   
Perhaps the liberation that comes from being an individual known to and knowing God personally is that missing element in life?
When you look at society today, the things that are prized (fame, money, advantage over others, being important, slick argument, “being yourself” in the Big Brother sense of saying exactly what you think without thought of the consequences for others in so doing, having the best of everything, doing exactly what you want to do) are about power and exerting that sense of self. 
Few people that get sucked into this belief system think about the consequences for their self, but the sense that something’s missing (the God-shaped hole) is often there in the statements that the “successful” people give to the press (being a reasonable person I’m compelled to point out this comments thread from the Daylight Atheism website that points out that confident atheists are also happy and that the posters seem to see it as a security-hole based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - but I see it as the Self-actualisation stage of Maslow rather than the Safety stage) .  And as is being seen in Africa, if embraced, that freedom can change worlds.

So how have we got ourselves to a stage where we are rejecting that freedom and regarding it as something that’s ok for others (even for liberating an enire continent) but just not for us?
Stephan Joubert, on the blog at www.echurch.co.za writes: 

One of my favorite quotes is that of Ernst Kaesemann, a well-known German theologian of the previous century. Just listen to what he writes as he’s thinking about Jesus: “People and institutions do not like to be kept continually on the alert, and they have constantly devised screens to protect themselves from too much heat. In fact, they have even managed to reduce Jesus’ red-hot message, which promised to kindle a fire throughout the world, to room temperature.”

If you look at church history through the centuries, that is just what has happened: sects appeared trying to rationalise what had happened (Jesus can’t have been human, he could only have been human, bodily ressurection wasn’t expected and therefore may be only spiritual ressurection took place, secret knowledge or good works required in addition to faith in Jesus in order to be saved… and so on).  Evidence if any were needed that the oldest message of the ressurection was hard to understand even then…
(Another aside – that ressurection was the key focus of faith in Jesus is clear from Paul’s letter here 1 Cor. 15:3-4: “ For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that he was buried and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.”) 
People in the UK tend to think Christianity’s about a bunch of old men in dresses with unworldly eyes or fuzzy beards, debating the morality of homosexuality and, dressed up smartly looking down on or turning away those who need access to that message of unconditional love.  Of course the church is not just its clergy (and in any case many clergy these days are younger, and/ or women) but the people that believe, and we need to be out there, spreading the word and helping people to be spiritually as well as physically whole.

And that’s an aspiration that’s not old fashioned, or unneeded where I am. 
And in looking forward, it’s the perfect thought for advent.