Author: glenn.myers

Paradox, and what to do with it.

stormy photo
Photo by Karsun Designs Photography

Paradox can be a happy place, and leaving it for a simpler place just leads to trouble, I think.

Paradoxes are like the edges of our known world. We sail out to them. But however far we continue to sail, we realise we aren’t getting any further.

Is it true that in all the big questions, if you keep asking long enough, you reach paradox? Suffering and a God of love. Free choice and fate. Healing and sickness. Success and failure. Knowing things and not knowing things. Death and life or judgement and mercy. How can they both exist together? What happens at the place they meet?

This is the place of paradox, where we stand in the cross-winds. Or perhaps the cross-hairs. Or perhaps just in the shadow of the cross itself, where Christ resolved paradoxes by becoming one.

I think the place of paradox is a bleak, empty place, or a full, contented one, depending on whether we stand and complain, or fall and worship.

 

The amazing growth of new Christians from an Islamic background

New figures count around ten million new Christians from an Islamic background.

A recent academic paper by Duane Millar and Patrick Johnstone (disclaimer: Patrick is a colleague of mine) has tried to put numbers on this recent, but widely-observed phenomenon. Indonesia leads the way with a well-established Christian movement that has lasted since the 1960s.

More recently, Christ-followers from an Islamic background have started to appear in large numbers in parts of Africa, in South Asia and Iran and some Western countries. The study claims that even Saudi Arabia, home of Islam, is home to 60,000 Islamic-heritage followers of Christ.

The study dovetails with a recent book by Southern Baptist researcher David Garrett A Wind in the House of Islam, that counts no mass movements to Christ at all in the Islamic world’s first 1000 years, two in the mid-twentieth century, a further 11 in the final decade of the twentieth century, and 69 more since then. Proof, as Garrett claims, that ‘something is happening.’

Here is Millar and Johnstone’s list of the countries that have 10,000 or more or more followers of Christ with an Islamic background. Their figures are based on 2010, and will have increased in most cases since.

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[amazon template=multinational&asin=1939124034]

 

When the opinion pollsters rang

I couldn’t really tell the truth

Was phoned up by Ipsos Mori last night and asked about the referendum, and then other stuff.

Some of the questions seemed like they would yield decent data: ‘eg: which way are you planning to vote?’.

But not so many. ‘On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to vote?’ I have voted at every opportunity since May 1979. Except in May 2013, when I was in a medically induced coma. (And the years I lived in other countries.) Is that a ’10’ then? There is still a week to go. I may fall ill, be hit by an asteroid or emigrate. Perhaps a 9? Or an 8? Or a 7?

Some questions can surely only yield false, pseudo-findings. ‘Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the current government?’ Do I only have two options? They are pretty good on not launching nuclear weapons. They have not reintroduced the rack. I expect they will leave office when voted out. They do not shoot dissidents. This is all good.

On the other hand, they tried to pay for tax breaks for the better-off by equivalent cuts to benefits for the poor which are already set at subsistence levels. This I find less than wholly pleasing.

Or again, what do I think of a certain political leader? My first, true answer, before being moderated by Christian principles, was that I was delighted with him. He has led his party into a wretched state of political self-harm. It’s a joy to behold. Here’s a civil war you can actually buy popcorn for and settle back and enjoy. I am not sure, however, that was the answer sought.

Not sure we should entirely trust the polls.

 

Update June 16: here’s the poll of which I was one of the 1,200 participants, wrapped in the Standard’s spin. Depressing. Questions that extinguish even the faintest possibility of light by demanding binary answers to complex questions — trumping truth, if you will, rather than finding it. For example: do I believe the Treasury forecasts? When has the Treasury got an economic  forecast right in the last 1000 years? So are they lying, then? They are playing games.  ‘Answer a fool according to his folly and you will be like him yourself.’ I wish it were over. 

‘Don’t die with your music still inside you’ – revisited

Fresh thinking on an idea that changed my life

on ne regrette rienIt’s not actually a Biblical idea; which is a problem.

I was galvanised when I first came across this phrase. Actually, since galvanised means ‘using electricity to coat something with zinc’, I wasn’t literally galvanised, but you know what I mean. The electrodes sizzled and cracked and I sat up sharply. A burst of electricity, and I had a new resilience.

Don’t die with your music still inside you. This was a sustaining thought during the dark period that followed my month-long coma in 2013. I tried to get back to health, for two reasons. To enjoy time with my family again. And to write the stuff that had been going on in my heart all my life. That phrase about ‘my music’ and ‘not dying’ was a sword for the fight.

I did recover, and it’s wonderful, and the stream of books I wanted to write has started to dribble. (See the sites for my fiction and my non-fiction.) I encourage everyone everywhere to take that phrase to heart and do something about it, whenever they can.

But as an idea, it isn’t quite true. It chimes with many Biblical themes: gifting, vocation. Everyone serving each other by doing what they love to do most.  But does it account for the obstacles and traps? For the stumbles in a broken world? For the person who gave themselves to caring for others rather than expressing the deep longings of their heart? For the child you lost or never had? For the fact that sometimes in our lives the night-time blinds are drawn in the middle of bright day?

Is it true that, for love’s sake, some people do ‘die with their music still inside them’?  Or does the brokenness of the world sometimes prevent it?

In truth, I think, everything in this pre-death life is just a preliminary. It’s just the starter for the eternal meal, and we don’t always even finish the starter. Our ‘music’ is not just for this life, but for eternity. Let’s hope some will emerge now, but anyways it will emerge later. It will be alright in the end, and if it’s not alright now, that means it’s not the end.

Eternity isn’t just about marvelling over the unfolding creativity of God. We were built in his image. Through the  unravelling ages we will be creating—letting out the music—alongside him. 

Faith comes by herring, and herring by the word of cod

Why fish are confused

ShoalI don’t think the average fish can get its head around the idea of dry land.

Perhaps a really creative fish could picture it, but it would face all kinds of scepticism from other fish. How do you swim without water? Wouldn’t the world be two-dimensional, spread on the sea-bed? How can there be room for everything? It’s a wreck.

Nor can science help. How can you do experiments to confirm or deny the presence of a world beyond the sea? Even if fish go there (a big if), they never come back.

The best schools of fish might conclude the whole ‘dry-land delusion’ is a theory, of no practical use, and best ignored. They would, in short, fillet the argument.

Send in the marine (biologist)s

Since the fish can’t figure out dry land for themselves, the only way they can be educated is if we land mammals take the initiative and send someone to tell them. Without revelation from outside, the fish are like the proverbial sailors of the ship carrying red paint that collided with the ship carrying blue paint: marooned.

So, you say, send a marine biologist to tell the fish about the world outside the sea. But would they believe her? Maybe not. Because to get to talk to the fish you have to become so like a fish that they think you are a fish. And who would believe what a raving fish told them?

Not only that, but I have it on good authority that the sea is full of all kinds of voluble fish who speculate widely about a life beyond the sea. Many of them are unreliable witnesses—fishy, in fact—and they contradict each other all the time.

The conclusion of reasonable people? Stick with what you can see, feel and measure. Truth can’t come from anywhere else.

Comments welcome, as are fish jokes.

 

Music and good lives converted me back

Always nice to hear of someone finding their way home.

Saxophone LoveIt was interesting to read of A N Wilson’s conversion back to the Christian faith, which he originally wrote about in 2009. Wilson is a writer, critic and rustler-of-feathers.

But in an engaging article, Wilson confesses he didn’t make a good swivel-eyed atheist and offers this suggestion as to why he turned back to Christianity:

The existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

In another place–the Daily Mail, not a publication I usually have the honour of reading–he added this:

My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known – not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.

‘Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is the most fun’

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back–in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
― Frederick Buechner

Two very big ideas

About what this Universe is for

street people
RomKa GG@flickr

One is from philosophy, one from theology. Each is an antidote to the popular idea that we humans are just annoying and insignificant growths on a small and remote rock.

Look at the people on the bus around you. Tattooed? Blue-rinsed? Unsavoury politics? Also precious. Cosmically significant. No, really.

Then look at your church if you attend one. Comically insignificant or cosmically significant? Or both? Read on.

Philosphy and sciencE


The existence of mind in some organism on the planet is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness … This can be no byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here. Paul Davies 1

This says: through the people on the bus around (and others) the soulless, material Universe has developed, or been given, a soul. Quite cool.

Theology and mission

[History] has its action in the eternal being of the Triune God before the creation; it has its goal in the final unity of the whole creation in Christ; and meanwhile the secret of this cosmic plan, the foretaste of its completion, has been entrusted to these little communities of marginal people scattered through the towns and cities of Asia Minor. Lesslie Newbigin 2

And this says: The little Christian communities of the world, a couple of million of them, a speckling in the human species, are somehow the link between Creation and re-Creation. We carry in us the first streaks of eternity’s dawn. In the midst of all our poverty.

Book Review: ‘There is a God’ by Anthony Flew

My monthly review of a wonderful book for those of us navigating the slowmission space between faith and doubt.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Enjoyable, brief ramble from the former to the probably final state of philosopher Antony Flew’s thinking, particularly about God, and including how he changed his mind from atheism to Deism. It is bookended by a lengthy introduction and an appendix by the actual writer of the book, Roy Abraham Varghese, and another by the biblical scholar of the hour, Tom, or NT, Wright. Flew took care to write, and personally sign, his own introduction.

Here’s a quote, cue unreasoned, buttock-clenching joy from theists and wailing and gnashing of teeth from his former atheist pals:

I must stress that my discovery of the Divine has proceeded on a purely natural level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena. It has been an exercise in what is traditionally called natural theology. It has no connection with any of the revealed religions. Nor do I claim to have had any personal experience that may be called supernatural or miraculous. In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith. (p93)

The ‘pilgrimage of reason’ soundbite could not be more perfectly chosen to delight and infuriate in equal measure.

The book is a good read. The Internet is also a good read, seeing some atheists build a case against the book using the same kind of tactics usually employed by cigarette companies, traffic lawyers, climate-change deniers or creationists, on the lines of ‘the old boy lost it, very sad, and was bundled into the back of a van by evangelicals and forced to sign a script someone else had written for him.’

Actually, the book is clear that Flew became a Deist, and never stopped personally rejecting all the received religions. He didn’t believe in an afterlife. He thought Christianity was the best available religion, but he didn’t claim to embrace it, despite the admittedly gorgeous scholarship of N T Wright. All this is in the book. It’s nice to find good atheist commentators who recognize this, and who agree with the broadsheet obituaries of Flew, not least in the New York Times which put some journalistic resource into investigating the circumstances of the book.

Flew had his marbles and after a lifetime of brilliant atheist philosophical discourse, took to believing that the universe was created by an infinite, immutable, omnipotent, First Cause.

Flew’s widow agreed that that was his position. The jeers and hoots coming from the Theist side may be in bad taste, but perhaps we should be allowed our little moment of fun. Remember, we also have to put up with Creationists and Republicans, and sometimes even have to call them ‘brother’.