Why blog? (Radio Times article)

Below is the text of the article I wrote for the Radio Times recently. Not surprisingly, it provoked a lot of comment and objection, mostly ignoring the central thrust of the article and picking up on the dismissal of Richard Dawkins as a ‘thinker’. The criticisms were fair and it was unwise of me to edit in a shorthand comment that needed more precision, clearer elaboration and a different context – none of which were possible in an 800 word commissioned article.

The deluge of comments (also by mail and email) was a little difficult to keep up with, given that (a) I have a rather busy day job and (b) it was Holy Week. But, apart from the reasonable criticisms levelled at me, there was some interesting discussion. Because it is spread over several threads (readers came in to the blog on different days and at different stages of posting), it is not easy to follow as a single conversation. However, I make the following observations before moving on to other areas of interest – after all, this is a personal blog and not an internet forum on a single theme:

1. I should be more careful before writing throw-aways without explaining them. Fair cop. (Richard Dawkins is obviously not an ‘awful thinker’ when it comes to some things, but is very vulnerable when it comes to religion, philosophy and that sort of thinking.)

2. Atheists derive their atheism from different origins and can’t be lumped together.

3. Some atheists are remarkably sensitive to any criticism of Richard Dawkins et al – and sometimes betray what comes over as a rather uncritical reading of him. This is odd when one of their criticisms of Christians/theists is their uncritical assumptions about the world.

4. Science explores and explains the mechanics of how the world works, but says nothing about ‘human meaning’. This is something that Philip Pullman and the Archbishop of Canterbury agree on. As ethicists put it, you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. This is where people like Pullman take over from Dawkins in grappling with morality and meaning, taking a different starting point and proving much more interesting (in my view).

5. ‘Proof’ is a slippery word, often used as if it were monovalent. As I wrote in response to an email yesterday (and this is concisely illustrative, so not intended to be a knock-down argument):

I prove that a table is a table by looking at it, measuring it, testing it (does it do what we expect a table to do?), using it and checking whether or not it conforms to what we usually mean by ‘table’. I prove that Hitler existed by looking at documentary evidence, historical evidence (what has happened to the shape of Europe, for example), literary evidence and personal record. I prove that my children (or friends) love me by the way they behave towards me. But, I don’t write off the existence of Hitler because I can’t do to him what I do to a table or because I have no relationship with him. Nor do I reject my family’s love on the grounds that I might be deceived and cannot provide incontrovertible ‘proof’ that that love is real.

In other words, we accept different ways of experiencing and validating reality. I can’t put God in a box and measure him. I can’t find a birth certificate for him. But I might want to explore the history of humanity, the search for meaning and morality, my/our experience of love (and what makes me think that my life and death matter at all).

6. I am grateful to all those who engaged in this matter and hope it leads to a more mutually respectful conversation along the lines I intended to open up in the article itself – before inserting the notorious distraction.

Here’s the text (which appeared under the title Why I am an E-vangelist – not a title I chose…):

Over a cup of tea, a woman in the garden of a church in Surrey asked me a question that nearly made me choke. Where was my chauffeur? She was clearly surprised to find that the world has moved on, that (most) bishops don’t live in huge palaces and that we usually drive ourselves to wherever we’re going. I dread to think how she would cope with some of the more radical social changes in British society in the past six decades.

For example, the demise of deference. There was a time when bishops and clergy were given automatic respect because of the offices they held. No longer. Respect has to be earned, and people feel free to argue with whatever you dare to say about anything. There are no longer any protective pedestals from which to preach, and dialogue is replacing monologue as the dominant medium of communication. Get out of the safety of the church and it’s a jungle out there. 

Yes, there are still people around who will listen uncritically to whatever they hear from a pulpit – especially if it ticks the “right” boxes and confirms their view of God, the world and us. There are Christians around who mourn the passing of the old world and fear the loss of a privileged place for Christian culture in the public square. I don’t mourn the passing of deference, but I do think that what has taken its place isn’t very impressive. Richard Dawkins isn’t alone in excelling in one field – such as biology – while being awful in another – such as “thinking”. Some commentators have a shockingly misplaced confidence in demolishing religious straw men that even I don’t believe in.

This is evident also in the blogosphere. I have been blogging since the end of 2008 – normally five times a week and I have had more than 5,000 views a day – but I am still amazed that so many people engage online with the things that interest me. When I started blogging, I decided that it was pointless to play it safe or simply propagate the usual stuff to the usual suspects. A number of bishops blog, but mainly for their church audience. I wanted to be “out there”, engaging in public debates about the world, politics, the arts, the media, ethics and theology.

My starting point is an insatiable curiosity about the world and about people, and why both are the way they are. At the heart of Christianity is the understanding that God has opted in to the world and not exempted himself from it: that Christian living means engaging at every level with and for that world. This means I’ve had to grow a thick skin. The glory and agony of blogging – which I see as the first word in a conversation, not the final word of judgement – is that anyone is free to argue with me, question me, ridicule me or be abusive. But what I have found is that my own thinking is changed by the light other contributors throw on a subject. The holes in my own perceptions are exposed as my prejudices and ideologies become open to scrutiny. That has got to be a good thing.

It’s an interesting exercise. I don’t know most of the people who comment on my blog – some I hope never to know, others I might like to befriend. But, whether they are critical or complimentary, they make me think. And I don’t regard it as a bad thing for any leader to think openly, change his mind when appropriate, apologise when he gets it wrong (in substance or in tone), or to be unafraid to be thought inadequate. We live in a culture in which politicians and others feel compelled to appear watertight in their consistency and always incontrovertibly “right”, but I think there is a place for a different model of “learning leadership”. Christian leaders should be unafraid to offer an alternative model of what I often call a “confident humility”.

An area of challenge relates to the atheists in the blogosphere, particularly those who represent perfectly what their prejudices tell them is the preserve of religious people: fundamentalism and an unswayable confidence in their own unargued-for assumptions about the world and human meaning.

This frequently leads to clashes, but the robustness of these is – if not always enlightening – usually entertaining. The blogosphere isn’t for the fainthearted. But what’s the point in simply talking to those who agree with you, when you could be arguing your way to a better understanding of God, the world and people (as well as yourself ) “out there” in the rough new world of instant media?

I think Christian faith is big enough to stand confidently in the public square. The worst they can do is crucify us. But then, Easter tells me even that isn’t the end of the story.

 

Pullman, Church and story

I’m a bit rushed, but Bishop Alan Wilson (the original and best blogging bishop) has posted some excellent stuff in the last week or so. I just want to link them so they get a (hopefully) wider audience:

On Good Friday as well as quoting a poem he posed some questions about how we think of the Jesus who was crucified.

On Saturday he reviewed Philip Pullman’s new book under the title The Goodman Philip and the Scoundrel Pullman? In this post he takes seriously Pullman’s challenge to the institutional Church, but refuses to let the writer get away with easy correlations – commenting up as follows:

This is, culturally, a rather “C of E” style of ecclesiology. The Church is anything but perfect, but always in need of necessary reformation. This comes from its interaction with the society it serves, not some infallible magisterium. Its teaching is found to be authoritative insofar as it is authentic and recognizably transmits the story and values of Jesus as fully as possible. The Church is authentic insofar as it allows its every activity to be judged by the Carpenter of Nazareth. Infallibilism, along with other fundamentalisms, neutralizes this discipline to vanishing point, weakens accountability, and thus becomes compelling but dangerous fantasy — a mere playing at Church-by-numbers.

Then on Monday he posted a wonderful reflection on what needs to be termed ‘Dead Horse Theology‘ – bringing together questions about the institution of the Church in the light of Easter and the real Jesus for whom Pullman is waving a flag.

Today he has gone further and quoted chunks of the conversation on Start the Week between Pullman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, David Baddiel and Mona Siddiqui. Holding it up as a great example of intelligent discussion, he picks up the particular question of how the Jesus of the ‘Story’ can survive the ‘institution’ – precisely the point Pullman is questioning in his new book. He concludes:

The measure of its success is not that it swells into a mighty institutional empire, but that it is still possible, even after all the refractive and corrupting influence of the human beings who make up the transmission chain, to distinguish Jesus’ message from its original context, and to attempt to live it in another. The story continues to judge the medium through which it is transmitted. This is the key insight of the Reformation, and the essence a Reformed Catholic Church, to hold that the Church is always accountable to the Word and its original founder.

I make no further comment other than to commend these posts for your perusal.

 

The Gospel According to Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman is my kind of atheist. He takes Christianity so seriously that he takes a long, hard look at its texts and its history and writes something that engages with it. He doesn’t start out by assuming that all Christians are either stupid or credulous, but shines a different light on its origins in the light of its later (institutional) development.

I posted a couple of days ago about Pullman’s new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, having heard him on the Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2. That was before I had read it. So, today I read it – it doesn’t take long. And I haven’t changed my mind. But see the excellent reviews by Rowan Williams and Alan Wilson – I won’t repeat them.

Pullman can’t resist being driven by a serious dislike and suspicion of the institutional church. It isn’t hard to understand why. But, I think that in order to grasp his critique, this has to be disconnected from his atheism and rooted in his understanding of Jesus and the Gospels. Although he wants to dismiss the bits of the Gospels he doesn’t like (or are inconvenient to his case), he does manage to shine the sort of light on them that should make Christian readers go back to the text and read them with the freshness that Pullman (the outsider?) brings to his reading. It certainly has its weaknesses, but doesn’t everything?

In fact, I came away from the book smiling at the conceit that forms the framework of the narrative, but pleased that he has done it. It is thoughtful, well-crafted and often moving. But, most of all, it is serious.

It seems to me that Christians ought to read the book and reflect (a) on why they read the Gospels the way they do and (b) why the institutional church can seem to some people so far away from the Jesus of the Gospels.

Atheists might read the book and then go back to the original Gospels to see how Pullman has tackled the narrative and its meaning. I am constantly amazed at how many people I meet who slag off the Bible clearly have never read it. (And, no, I am not lumping every atheist or ‘opponent’ into that category.) An atheist approach to Jesus (as he is depicted and recorded in the Gospels) can be enlightening even if not always compelling.

Pullman and Rowan Williams were on BBC Radio 4 this morning on Andrew Marr’s Start the Week. This sort of intelligent conversation (about a range of matters) lifts the spirit. But it made me realise that the mutual respect between Pullman and Williams is what sets them free to have this sort of conversation in the first place. They could agree that science is limited to descriptions of mechanics and cannot denote ethical imperatives. They understand myth, literature and thought. So, they can start beyond the cat-calling that characterises some debate about theism and atheism (from a ‘scientific’ perspective) – something that I and others can learn from.

(I wonder whether the story about Rowan Williams criticising the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland will still hold up now people have heard the original discussion. He was clearly making a wider point about the problem for the whole of a society posed by the corruption of an institution so woven into its fabric – in other words, it isn’t just  aproblem for the Church, but for the whole of that society. An intelligent point – and one that got completely lost amid the hysteria about ‘credibility’. Intelligent points don’t make for good headlines, however, and Rowan walked through an open ‘media story’ door.)

 

Pullman’s punches

The great writer Philip Pullman was interviewed on the Jeremy Vine Show this afternoon (BBC Radio 2) and the piece can only be listened to for the next seven days – unfortunately. Pullman’s new book is published tomorrow and is called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Obviously, I haven’t read it, but I have read and heard enough to make me want to read it.

According to the interview, the novel basically attempts to distinguish between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Christ appropriated by the Church: the former was a good bloke, but the latter went astray and got it all wrong. Several things can be said about this:

1. This isn’t new thinking. Many twentieth-century theologians tried to make a similar distinction between the ‘Jesus of history’ and the ‘Christ of faith’. Of course, the distinction was arbitrary and often a convenient way of dealing with the difficult or inconvenient bits of the New Testament. So, the reaction by some Christians to the idea of Pullman’s book simply demonstrates that they are a bit behind on their theology.

2. The Church should not feel the need to hide from its history and especially from its mistakes. Pullman and others often do us a service by shining a light on us that can only be directed from outside the Church – illuminating our weaknesses and inconsistencies. What is the problem with this? The Church has a good theology of failure (and redemption) and shouldn’t be scared of being seen as it is and as it has been. OK, Pullman is a bit preoccupied with it and not all his critiques stand much scrutiny, but some of it does.

The interview was interesting, dealing with the nature of the Gospels, the status of the Bible and the mindset of those nutters who threaten Pullman with death. Pullman respects the Gospels and the biblical text, but sees them as works of human inventiveness. What disturbs him is not the witness they bear, but the use made of them (for reasons of power) by subsequent generations of Christians. He acknowledges the apologetic power of the inconsistencies in the Gospels – particularly in relation to the resurrection accounts – and recognises that unified narratives would have been the product of propaganda.

However, the subtleties of biblical literature are clearly lost on some of those who then called in to comment on these matters (as, again, George Pitcher points out):

• ‘The Bible is just fiction’ demonstrates a stupid ignorance of both (a) what fiction is and (b) what the Bible is. The Bible is made up of a range of different genres of literature and (as one example) poetry cannot be read in the same way as prophecy or a New Testament letter. To write off the whole ‘book’ as ‘fiction’ just proves that the contributor hasn’t bothered to read it as it is written.
• ‘The Bible cannot be questioned or re-written’ is simply sad. I agree that it can’t be re-written (it is what it is) any more than Hamlet can be re-written without it becoming a different play. But if the Bible has to be protected from scrutiny, debate, argument or challenge, then it isn’t worth reading in the first place. Pullman stated that ‘the Gospels do not belong to the Church’ – and he is right. Jesus made it clear anyway that he was for the world, fulfilling what had always been the vocation of Israel: to live and give his life in order that the world might see who and how God is (and respond accordingly). The Bible must be able to stand in the marketplace or it cannot be what it claims to be. Jesus (and the Gospels) cannot be caged by the Church.
• ‘We wouldn’t do this to the Quran’ simply exasperates me. Do we really think Christians should consider emulating the worst of Muslim extremism? As George Pitcher admirably and clearly explained in yesterday’s Telegraph, we shouldn’t confuse the woeful (and often silly) ignorance of secularists and some atheists with some bizarre and inappropriate notion of ‘persecution’.

Christians are in danger of saying by their defensiveness that Christian faith and the Bible itself are so vulnerable that they must not be challenged and must be protected. As I have remarked in an article in the Easter edition of the Radio Times (no link available), we have no reason to be afraid of challenge or scrutiny – Christians need to be a little more confident and a little more intelligent in articulating their faith and their understanding of the story told by the Scriptures. As Pullman pointed out, a Christian notion of ‘inspiration’ is not the same as an Islamic one – but plenty of Christians treat the Bible as if it were.

The answer to Pullman is to write something better and more convincing – not to threaten him. Pullman is at least able and willing to have a reasonable and informed conversation with Christians – unlike some of the New Atheists he is often lumped in with.

Bishop Alan Wilson has an interesting ‘take’ on the interface between Christians and atheists in his comment on Peter Tatchell. Worth a look in conjunction with these observations on Christian confidence when in engagement with writers like Philip Pullman.

 

Pulling down and building up: Citizen Ethics Network

When the Telegraph launched its month-long revelation of MPs’ expenses I posted a very critical response. In turn I was heavily criticised and posted further pieces as the very interesting debate between several offended journalists, me and others developed.

My fundamental charge was (put succinctly) that having ‘pulled down’ trust in public servants, what responsibility does the media have for ‘building up’ trust in public institutions? I was roundly told that the media have no responsibility for building up: they merely report what the wicked people do and leave it to the rest of us to put the pieces back together again. I refused (and continue to refuse) to accept this – that as long as journalists consider themselves to be part of civil society, they have a responsibility to be constructive within it. Or, put differently, those who hold the rest of us to account must themselves be open to public accountability for their own behaviour. The media do not only ‘reflect’ our culture, they shape it powerfully.)

Part of my concern in these matters derives from the deep respect I have for many politicians at both local and national level. Much of their work is unseen and unglamorous, they often work very long hours in the interests of their constituents, they are required to master ridiculously detailed briefs on a ridiculously broad range of matters, and they are then held up to ridicule, denigration and suspicion by media people who make a living out of critical observation of others. Perhaps this is why so many good politicians (as well as bad ones) are now questioning whether or not they should stay in public life any longer. Many of us wonder why they have stayed so long.

It seems fundamental to human flourishing that people need to be valued and affirmed. Perhaps it should not be surprising that we don’t get the best out of people who are consistently derided and constantly having to defend themselves. And if journalists consistently rank below politicians in public trust ratings, it is a little surprising that we give such authority to journalists when they write negatively about politicians.

Now, none of this is written to condemn journalists or naively praise politicians. It is just how it is – and maybe always has been. But, despite cries for a change in how we address our public culture, there has been a distinct lack of positive movement in addressing widespread concerns about the corruption of our public discourse. Again, perhaps it should not surprise us that political apathy – reflected in fewer and fewer voters exercising their democratic responsibility – proves to be the fruit of such ‘language’.

So, the launch of the Citizen Ethics Network is hugely welcome. This has been established in conjunction with the Guardian and its inaugural pamphlet (which was published with Saturday’s Guardian) can be downloaded and debate entered on the Comment is Free website. When I read it I felt genuine hope for the first time in a long time that it might be possible to change the way we talk about ethics, public policy and those who engage in the public discourse. Perhaps, at last, we can begin to talk properly, intelligently and passionately (but politely) about how we are constructing our public life and conversation about it.

The foreword by Philip Pullman is superb (apart from a single line – which I will mention later). He describes three characteristics of a virtuous state:

• courage: the courage to keep economics in its right place and for public servants to do what is right even when faced with strong persuasion to do otherwise;
• modesty: inviting Britain to become realistic about its contemporary reality in the world and cut its image-cloth accordingly;
• intellectual curiosity: linking such curiosity to freedom and claiming (rightly) that ‘delight’ is fundamental to a culture that promotes freedom:

…delight is like a canary in a coal mine: while it sings, we know that the great public virtue of liberty is still alive. A nation whose laws express fear and suspicion and hostility cannot sustain delight for very long. If joy goes, freedom is in danger. A nation that was brave, and modest, and curious would understand that, and would never forget the value of telling its children stories.

Each contribution in the pamphlet is worth reading – if only to see how differently people see ‘virtue’ and, therefore,  how essential is the task of creating a common conversation built on respect, curiosity and commitment to human flourishing and the public good.

My only small caveat in this is in a single sentence from Pullman’s foreword:

Those who insist that all ethical teaching must be religious in origin are talking nonsense. Some of it is: much of it isn’t.

In my experience the problem lies not with religious people thinking they have a monopoly on virtue, but with non-religious people assuming that religious people think they have such a monopoly. The response is to try to exclude religious thinkers from the conversation. I wonder why Pullman didn’t write: “Much of it is: some of it isn’t.” That might have been more accurate. The point is, however, that ‘secularists’ need to stop trying to ridicule or exclude religious voices – whilst religious people need to listen carefully to what secularists say and how they see the world and human meaning. That way lies a conversation that will be courageous, modest and brimming with intellectual curiosity – and ultimately leading (hopefully) to delight.

As the great Bruce Cockburn wrote:

Amid the rumours and the expectations / and all the stories dreamt and lived / Amid the clangour and the dislocation / and things to fear and to forgive / Don’t forget about delight…