Author: glenn.myers

Tom Holland on Marx

I may have mentioned how much I enjoyed Tom Holland’s book Dominion, which explains the Western mindset as something that emerged, like lentils, made edible after a good soaking – in this case a soaking in two milliennia of Christian thought. Here’s his take on Karl Marx.

[Marx claimed] All his evaluations, all his predictions, derived from observable laws, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ Here was a slogan with the clarity of a scientific formula.

Except, of course, that was no such thing. Its line of descent was evident to anyone familiar with the Acts of the Apostles. ‘Selling their possessions and goods , they gave to everyone as he had need.’ Repeatedly, throughout Christian history, the communism practised by the earliest Church had served radicals as their inspiration … [ p441]Marx’s interpretion of the world appeared fuelled by certainties that had no obvious source is his model of economics. They rose instead from profounder depths. Again and again, the magma flow of his indignation would force itself through the crust of his scientific-sounding prose. For a self-professed materialist, he was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil … The very words used by Marx to construct his model of class struggle – ‘exploitation’, ‘enslavement’,’avarice’ – owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets. If, as he insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then it was one that seemed eerily like a recalibration of it. (pp440-441)

The pre-soaked Western mind

See the world differently

I’ve just finished a remarkable book. I know I spend a lot of time (and have lots of my adventures) within the pages of a good book, but this one was special, making me see the world a different way.

The argument of Tom Holland’s bestseller Dominion is that the Western mind has been so deeply tinted by the Christian faith that we can’t wash it off, and everything we touch carries the stain. Some examples:

  • Atheism is a child of Christendom. The battle against superstition, against gods being everywhere, and gods for everything, goes back to the book of Genesis, was refuelled by the book of Isaiah, was clear in Paul, and emerged again in the Reformation, with the frightening statue-smashing of the reformers. (I visit my nearby Ely Cathedral and still am shocked by the damage, and this rowdy lot are evidently my spiritual ancestors.) What was the French Revolution? Christian-inspired iconoclasm clad in the garments of rationalism. It’s not that ‘pure reason’ had existed forever, bubbling under the surface somewhere, waiting to be let out. What did for the idols, what did for superstition was Christianity, and the revolutionaries just grabbed its clothes.
  • Humanism is a child of Christendom. As Tom Holland points out, ‘The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history’ (p522). And in this case, the history of Christendom. The World Humanist Congress (an almost entirely Western affair) affirming in 2002, ‘the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual’ is itself a statement of pure dogma, proven neither by science nor reason, but grounded in a Christian perspective on the world. The peoples of antiquity didn’t believe it. The idea that the weak are just as valuable as the strong is a Christian idea and ideal.
  • The American Constitution, for those who are interested, is a child of Christendom. Listen to this fun quote: ‘That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths … The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic – no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think – was the book of Genesis’ and ‘The genius of the authors of the United States constitution was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that as the prime religious inheritance of their fledging nation.’ (p384).

I could go on. In future blogs, I probably will.

Overcome evil with good (and slow)

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

In Erzin county in Turkey, despite the two earthquakes, not a single building collapsed. The Economist reported that ‘the local mayor and his predecessor told local media that they did not allow any illegal construction. Both used the same phrase: “My conscience is clear.”‘1. Another theory is that the geology of that area is different from more damaged places. Perhaps the answer is a complex mix of factors; or perhaps integrity was enough.

Lots of press commentary implies that, though Turkey has strict building codes, a little informal negotiation with local officials usually meant you could reinforce your steel with less iron or add another floor or two. These were the buildings that fell like concrete Jenga blocks on their sleeping tenants.

Was that evil? And is ‘evil’ (if it exists) the reason lots of hopeful optimism about the benefits of reason and technology are overstated or misplaced? If people were reasonable, and if we got the tech right, perhaps we could build buildings on earthquake zones that didn’t fall down. But as soon as developers suck their teeth, and bend a bit, and hand over some cash, and ease down on what are very restrictive and expensive rules, which shut out ordinary people from buying homes at reasonable prices…

We are all of us suspects in these crimes. What do any of us do when (as we think) an overfussy law stands inconveniently in our way? When does a little flexing and bending, or even a little transgressing, become ‘evil’? Food for thought.

The perils of music

Especially if you’re trying to avoid invisible beings

It can bite. Photo by Raúl Cacho Oses on Unsplash

I had to write an article recently about what happens to people who leave God and God-stuff alone 1.

I wrote about my suspicion that God doesn’t leave them alone.

One culprit was music:

Perhaps this is a stretch for some of us. But theology teaches us that music is a shared feature of heaven and earth. Both realms ring with song, heaven more so than earth, and for a reason. Think of an orchestral or choral performance: unity, diversity, individual gifts, some performers with a great range and others just bashing triangles at appropriate moments, all blended into a completeness that is not static or boring, but fluid and dynamic; at its best, an ever-flowing perfection of fulfilled performers harmonizing together. Isn’t it, can’t it be, a heavy hint of what God and his people are destined finally to be? When you hear or perform music, are you distantly echoing what the divine is and does? Are your expressing a desire for something greater than what you have now? Are you reaching for transcendence? If I may say so, I think you may be. Even some of the most hard-boiled atheists I know seek transcendence in music.  

Food for thought.

‘To no-one sell, to no-one deny justice’

Eight hundred and eight years ago, they got it right.

I was at King’s Cross Station and I had some time so I popped over to the British Library to see its treasures. (I’ve done this, and blogged about this, before.) It’s rich.

  • The Codex Siniaticus, in its fading capital Greek letters, mother lode of all the Bibles in the world:
  • A Gutenburg Bible, all beautifully neat and Germanic.
  • Some decorated gospels, astonishingly intricate, every page a painting.
  • St Cuthbert’s pocket Bible, the oldest bound book in Europe, c. ad 700, handwritten, carried by the saint in his travels and placed with him in his grave.

There’s a folio from Mozart, hand-scribbled, his crochets little dots:

You can run your eye over Jane Austen’s portable writing desk…

or a letter from Gandhi from prison or a suffragette appeal to the Prime Minister. All in one place…

Just to be greedy, the British Library has two copies of the Magna Carta, one illegible. It also displays its full text, and tells about its chequered history, revoked, altered, reissued, but still a foundation stone because it anchored in English law the Biblical idea: not rex lex (the king is the law) but lex rex (the law is king).

One historian (I think it was Neall Ferguson) has discussed what he calls ‘apps’ that when set to run in a nation, make it prosper and its peoples thrive. Here’s one that has survived down the years in English law from the Magna Carta, enshrined there still despite all the revocations and revisions:

To no-one will we sell, to no-one will we delay or deny right or justice.

Plenty of people in the UK could perhaps argue that justice for them has been delayed or denied. Nevertheless. I’ve had the privilege of knowing many justice workers over the years and, articulated or not, attributed to the Magna Carta or not, I think the fire still burns and is the motive force behind those who serve.

Slow, inconvenient, annoying to some in power. May it be so always.

Sneaky transcendence

It keeps slipping in

Photo by John Baker on Unsplash

I wrote last week how the great classic science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s was really modernism in the clothes of fiction. (This is a discovery for me. Sorry if it was obvious to you.) It argued, throw enough Reason and Technology at the world, and its problems will be solved. In a way it was a continuation of the 19th century idea of ‘Progress’ where with enough steam and civilisation, all the ‘savages’ would be tamed. ‘Space,’ said James T Kirk, representing both 1960s SF, and a Victorian mindset: ‘the final frontier.’

I mentioned Arthur C Clarke, science and science fiction writer, my writing hero when I was younger. I have read everything I can find that he wrote, a compliment I’ve paid to no other writer. I studied at the same college as him, and much the same subject. (He did a joint honours in maths and physics at King’s College London, I did physics only, and not so well.) I’ve read about him, his work with the British Interplanetary Society, his meeting at the Eastgate pub in Oxford with Val Kilner, C S Lewis, and J R R Tolkien, his admission of not being exactly ‘gay’ (though he surely was) but ‘merely mildly cheerful’.

He said religion was mumbo jumbo and implied science was the surer answer. (Lewis and Tolkien, both Christians, were technophobes and I’m not sure they possessed a fridge between them. Clarke, at the same time, was calculating orbital mechanics to get his short stories right. So their pub meeting failed, shall we say, to find consensus.)

Clarke’s worlds, set a century or so from the his 1950s present, were places where reason and technology had continued to fuel the upward march of progress. So Clarke was, in worldview, an old-fashioned 19th century liberal, albeit working into the 21st.

Clarke insisted on ‘absolutely no religious rites of any kind’ for his funeral. And yet. The transcendant kept sneaking in to his work. It’s there in Childhood’s End and it’s powerfully present in the Nine Billion Names of God, where a computer successfully prints out all God’s (apparently) nine billion names, thus fulfilling the purpose for which humans were created. Then the programmers, who are on their way home, look up, and in one of the most striking ends to any short story, ever, they see, ‘overhead, without any fuss, the stars were all going out.’

Transcendence. Hard to stamp out.

Crazy evil and crazy good and the limits of science fiction

AI-generated image of Keziah Mordant, anti-heroine of my three novels, who is both crazy evil and crazy good

I have just now realized that the science fiction I loved as a youngster was all modernist propaganda.

Sourced in the 1950s and 1960s, the work of one of my childhood heroes, Arthur C Clarke, and others (including the original Star Trek), described a near-future world where Reason and Technology had solved most of our problems. And they promoted the assumption therefore that the key to the human problem was Education and Science. This is modernist propaganda, and it has happily been blown apart by later writers of SF and fantasy, both comic and serious.

Crazy evil gets in the way. As has been pointed out, a good education and a fine grounding in science can enable, rather than prevent, crazy evil. You need a good education and a fine grounding in science to create gas chambers (for example). And however we try to solve human problems, some human bias against the good and right, a bias we all have, gets us tangled in our shoelaces. Reasoning beings, we aren’t always ruled by reason; and science increases our capacities, rather than our moral sense. Malnutrition declines; obesity becomes a leading cause of death. Childhood illnesses are cured, thanks to medical advances; but one in four late-teen females in the UK report mental health problems. A society awash in reason and technology is a place of ill-health in new ways.

Our happy ending will never arrive by reason and technology alone. There’s too much crazy evil –in us, in society– for that. Yet the desire for a happy ending is so deep in us. Surely it can only be finally attained by crazy good, by grace, by the unearned. ‘I am creating a new heavens and a new earth’ says the book of Isaiah1. ‘If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come 2.’ It has to come from outside ourselves.

This helpful book got me thinking about this stuff (though I found a cheaper version):

And this wonderful book by Mary Doria Russell, about a Jesuit mission to alpha centauri, brilliantly shows as inadequate the modernist worldview in SF. (Russell won the Arthur C Clarke award with it, a tribute to both writers I think.) A pity the author, having written a classic, moved away to other genres.

Why academic theology departments should be subject to government cuts

Photo by Samuel Perez on Unsplash

There are several reasons for this.

  1. Theologians try to run before they can walk. I have written about this before, but nobody noticed, so I feel OK to write about it again. Before attempting something on The Meaning of Kenosis or The Problem of Evil they should prove their abilities on simpler matters. The Problem of Trapped Wind, for example, or the Problem of Notable Theologians Borrowing Your Study While You Are Out and Picking their Noses and Putting the Pickings on the Underside of Your Desk. Solve these, and you have an audience for life.
  2. Their training is deficient. No-one should be allowed to be in charge of anything or opine on anything unless they have (a) changed nappies and (b) organized and run a toddlers’ birthday party. The most advanced degrees should only be awarded to those who have personally sucked snot from an infant nose.1 We have had enough of academics marking their own homework and being of no practical use.
  3. They hide their work from their intended audience by having it traditionally published. Learned journals and academic textbooks keep your work and your audience well apart from each other. So you have written an insightful monograph on how future hope informs present praxis? Well done for putting it in inaccessible journals or expensive print books. Hardly anyone can reach it in there. The youth worker in Nigeria, the pastor in the Philippines, the church-planter among the Dalits in India won’t be able to study your stuff to nurture thoughtful, rounded, disciples of Christ, even though each has a mobile phone with lots of storage and data. They’ll have to make do with the free stuff from permatanned American 2 preachers instead. By hiding your work in antediluvian print, you ensure that discipleship for most Christian flocks will be reduced to saying some magic words to get rich quick.
  4. Well done!

Stripping

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Alas, this post is not as interesting as you naughtily think.

One of the nice things about being as old as I am1, and having friends and relatives who are equally old, is that after many years we have perhaps found whom we love, what we like, what we’re good at, where we fit, how we contribute. It’s nice and a pleasant change from all the earnest efforts to learn and earn and gain respect and find a place. Six decades of labour, one decade of rest, of settling down into a space and portion. Perhaps. Surely if we ever get to feel that way, we are among the lucky ones.

For those of us trying to do Christian discipleship, however, it leads straight into another snare: loving our place, our home, our competence perhaps, our way of contributing–more than loving Jesus himself.

He did warn us about this, and I think it is a common enough experience for many that he takes people like us, the product of many years of answered prayers and undeserved blessings, and gives us a good hard prune, stripping us back.

At the time, the only bits of ‘good hard prune’ that we feel is the single word ‘hard’. Perhaps we only get to see the ‘prune’ and the ‘good’ long afterwards. Everyone’s experience is different, but perhaps the outcomes are similar: the taming of ambition. A fresh realizing of the power and importance of love. A contentment with the large or the small.

Even just to begin down this road though … lovely.

The healing before the healing

Photo by Ben Griffiths on Unsplash

The wonderful ‘MD’ from the magazine ‘Private Eye’ is cheaper and quicker than any number of inquiries into the National Health Service. One of his main points is that the NHS suffers when society suffers. It is free, like schools, the police, and even the prison service. Hospital doors are always open. So if people can’t get the help they really need, they seek out the hospital or the doctor.

Or to put it another way, there is a link between poverty, unstable homes, abuse, poor living conditions, poor nutrition, generally not being able to cope with being an adult; and ill-health. But ill-health is the easiest to address because all you have to do is troll up to the accident and emergency department.

With all the other things, if the state can fix them at all, there’s the problem of finding whom to ask, and then a process, delays, bureaucracy, forms to fill, queues to be at the end of, and if you reach the front of the queue they may not have what you need.

Schools are the same; they have to take the kids even if their lives elsewhere are crumbling. And prisons have to take whomever the courts send, so they find space for the mentally ill who, if other parts of the state were working effectively, wouldn’t be there at all.

An issue for politicians, then, and perhaps for the Christian community: the main way to fix the NHS, and schools at the same time, and with a side order of reducing the prison population, is to fix everything upstream that leads to people crowding towards the easily-accessed freebies. And the way to fix national budgets, perhaps, is to shift them towards the slow: stable, warm homes, good nutrition, fitness, and friendship and social support that stops people falling ill (and incidentally keeps them happier and more fruitful) in the first place.

Much easier, of course, said than done, not least because it is long-term and even if done well only addresses part of the ‘problem’ of the NHS. (Another part of its ‘problem’ is the Health Service’s ability to keep many of us alive, which requires a lot of maintenance, rather than dead, which doesn’t. The NHS’s successes poisons its own well.)

This affects healing in the Christian context too. A lot of the best healing ministry is, or perhaps should be, not healing at all but pre-healing: the network of love, the care, the personal disciplines, the pursuit of joy and vocation and indeed the pursuit of God himself, which save us from being ill. Real healing restores these; but really real healing prevents us from becoming sick in the first place, at least sometimes.

Of course all this is simplistic, obvious, easy to point out, hard to do, and is anyway only a temporary fix. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is coming for us. We will disassemble soon. The only permanent solution is the Christian hope. But I’m reminded how much healing should have a wide focus –the whole person in a loving network–not a narrow one — such as increasing the anti-depressant dose.