For those who have doubts

From the Unlocking by Adrian Plass 1994 The Bible Reading Fellowship

On this particular day, I feel a failure. What am I allowed to wonder, Father?

Am I allowed to wonder why you make it all so difficult? Even as I say those words the guilt settles.

Perhaps it isn't really difficult at all.

Probably it's me that's difficult.

Probably, because of my background, and my temperament, and my circumstances, it was always going to be difficult for me.

But what if that's just a cop-out? What if I' m kidding myself?

What if, deep inside, I know that my own deliberate doing and not doing has always made it difficult?

What if I' m one of those who has been called, but not chosen? In that case it's not difficult-it's impossible.

What if you don't exist at all, and death is a sudden stumble into silence?

(Can you let me know if you-don't exist, by the way-before Friday night, if it's all the same to you.)

There are moments, Father, when it's so easy, so easy that I can't remember why it ever seemed so difficult.

Those moments pass-they're valuable-but they pass. Have you noticed how, when those moments have gone, I try to walk away, but I can't?

I think I shall follow you even if you don't exist. Even if I'm not chosen ..

Even if it goes on being difficult ... Are you still listening?

I'm sorry to have made a fuss,

It's just that, on this particular day, I feel a failure. My feet and hands hurt,

And there's this pain in my side.

Have you seen the news?

The French Bank Soceite General lost 4.9bn Euros.  The courts have found trader Jerome Kerviel guilty but it would take him 180,000 years to repay the dept if he devoted his entire current salary to the task.

God has paid the price for mankind’s sin, how long would it take to repay this debt?

Lord help us to re-imagine your world so we present ourselves as a living sacrifice – Holy acceptable to you.

We have been captivated by work to rescue of the 33 Chiliean miners.  We have perhaps forgotten the thousands who die every week of hunger, preventable diseases and violence; the thousands who live under the threat of violence, the millions who have been displaced.

Lord help us to re-imagine your world so we plead for the fatherless and widows

We view the commonwealth games with interest.  We heard that some of the accommodation was not up to standard.  “Nobody would want to live in that sqallor” said one spokesman forgetting that many 100s of millions of inhabitants of India would willingly trade their slums for what we regard as sub-standard.

Lord help us to re-imagine your world so we remember that what we do for the least our brethren we do it for you.

We hear of funding made available for treatment of to help prevent the isolation of dementia.  Yet millions in our country are lonely, without hope and desperate.

Lord help us to re-imagine your world so we spend time not just with our friends but include those on the edge of society.

Commonwelth Games England's Anthem - Jerusalem---NO NO NO!

The feet of Jesus did not walk upon "England's mountains green" in ancient times.

The Kingdom that Christ is building is the Kingdom of Heaven, not a kingdom with earthly territorial borders or a new Jerusalem based in England.

Oh dear....

Infidelity on demand or Matt 5 27-30

An item on the Today programme alerted me to the presence of websites for those who married who would like an affair.  Apparently 30% of people going to singles dating sites are actually married.  A quick Google search shows numerous sites offering this type of service

The protagonist was very honest, he was doing it for financial gain.  The earnest lady opposing was doing a very good job of defending the institution of marriage.  But that was the level of the debate, marriage is worth preserving, it needs working at.  The website guaranteed anonymity, apparently digital evidence often leads to a partner discovering infidelity.

It needn't lead to actual sex apparently it could just be Cybersex...so that’s OK then. 

Well not actually.  Christ' teaching that even to contemplate murder or adultery in ones heart is tantamount to the act itself in God's eyes.  His standards are rather high.  Nobody on the programme said such a site was fundamentally wrong. It is an example, if I read the text correctly, of an arm that needs cutting off or an eye that needs plucking out.  I can do that as an individual by not visiting these sites but what does God think of a society that condones rather that condemns such sites?  Are we afraid to speak out?  Have we become so individualistic that we don't think we are judged as a society?

Andrew Marin - Love is an orientation

I was attracted to this book due to the strong recommendation in  Andrew Goddard’s review.

Marin, brought up as a conservative evangelical, was stunned when over a short period three of his close friends declared they were gay.

The book explores his journey in coming to terms with this.  If you are looking for an definite answer to questions on the issues raised then this is not the book.  Instead Marin describes his journey and the setting up of his foundation.

There are some very challenging things in the book such as why is it the GLBT community are more loving than the church or as he puts it, they "out Jesus us".  Also the old expression to love the sinner but hate the sin loses credence when the sin is such an integral part of a persons make up.  God doesn’t wait for the wandering eye of the heterosexual to stop wandering before he welcomes them – how do I react to those in gay relationships?

It certainly made me think about all sin quite differently.  I do think Jesus’ call to repentance is central to Christianity but maybe there are things I need to repent of first.

Another deep sigh - the End of God BBC4 September 21st

Something new from the BBC? - well I lived in hope.  The End of God was from QMC's Historian Dr. Thomas Dixon; no doubt built on his "Science and Religion: A very Short Introduction".  I guess it was a cheap make for the BBC as he had much material from the 50 years of archived Horizon programmes. 

However there was nothing new in his programme to move us on.  Going back to Darwin, Huxley and Wilberforce he showed that there had been much heat and not a lot of light shed on the debate between those who hold on to a literal view of Genesis and those who don't.  He had a pop at religious experience and miracles drawing on previous Horizons which exposed such things to the scientific method. 

But none of this really helps.  We know that we can't prove the existence of God according to any scientific method.  If we could it wouldn't be  "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" Heb 11:1

Yes we know that the god of the gaps keeps getting smaller and the Intelligent Design mob have fallen for thinking they have found a special gap....almost certainly not is the conclusion from the programme and quite right too.

Yet he concludes with the suggestion that we, or at least some of us, are genetically predisposed to believe in God...well there is a new twist on predestination.

No it has to be an act of faith and by its very nature there will be detractors.  In the west persecution seems to be reduced to Intellectual ridicule.  What am I not doing that I should be?

The new religion of the sacred string

I had to wait for the official publication date for my copy of Hawking and Mlodinow’s  The Grand Design.  It had been much heralded in the press. “The universe was created by itself - not by God, says Stephen Hawking” is the headline in the Daily Mirror, stating he had changed his mind since writing A brief history of time.  As I understand it neither statement is exactly true, or perhaps I should say presents a wholly reliable model, of the thinking of Britain’s best known scientist.

As a physicist who stopped researching in 1978 I find the book a very good read, easy and accessible but I am somewhat doubtful if a wider audience will find all of it thus. As one might expect from the pen (or speech synthesizer) of somebody who seems to buy completely into modernism there is an assurance or perhaps arrogance throughout.  Very early on we learn “Philosophy is dead” along with God one supposes. 

The inexorable advance of the scientific models against the god’s of the gaps is, as so often the case, extrapolated to supposedly demolish all theism. There is nothing new in this and Prof. Dawkins would no doubt say a loud amen in the temple of fundamentalist atheism.  Keith Ward and others ably counter these claims if Hawking and Dawkins are willing to allow them to speak from their death beds.

Hawking’s main thesis seems to be that we now have at least a candidate for a complete theory of everything.  M-theory, a collection of so called string theories allow the four fundamental forces of nature to be combined into a single model.  Physicists have had a good measure of success combining electromagnetism (compass needles and rubbed balloons sticking to walls), the strong force which holds atoms together and the weak force which explains why some atoms decay.  They have struggled for decades to include gravity in their models.  When you feel a heavy object falling on ones foot it is perhaps surprising to learn that for a physicist gravity is a weak force.  Experimentally attempts to tie it down in a consistent way with the other forces have proved illusive.  M-theory, according to Hawking is a theoretical answer. 

However what we are offered is a model which cannot be tested experimentally.  The model may be successful but it can only be successful on paper and in the minds of those few chosen individuals who can do the mathematics.    Come to think of it that rings a few bells in a discipline much nearer to home.

A noble prize winning physicist Sheldon Glashow was so upset when Harvard University started a string theory group that he resigned from the establishment.  He says

“The string theorists have a theory that appears to be consistent and is very beautiful, very complex, and I don't understand it. It gives a quantum theory of gravity that appears to be consistent but doesn't make any other predictions. That is to say, there ain't no experiment that could be done nor is there any observation that could be made that would say, "You guys are wrong." The theory is safe, permanently safe. I ask you, is that a theory of physics or a philosophy?”

One is tempted to say philosophy is dead long live the philosophers!

But there are serious questions posed by modern physics which the church needs to address.  Have we a theology of Creation which is consistent with the experimentally proven successes of physics?  Quantum theory states that ultimately things are governed by probability not certainty.  How does this impact on the outworking of the sovereignty and providence of God?  Of course some must engage with these issues; we must not shrink from them.

When I left Experimental Physics to take up employment in engineering I learned pragmatism in applying science.  My science had to be useful to solve engineering problems to make things efficient, or cheaper or more reliable. As I now start my ordained ministry it seems to me theology needs to be practical.  The useful theological models are the ones that are readily applied in ministry.

Of course in the creed the Early Fathers got there long ago.  God is first my Father before he is my Creator.  The primary model which holds everything together is relational.  Doing should spring from being God’s child.