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Thursday 31 October 2019

Worldliness New and Worldliness Old

A Visit to Bath
Roman  Baths with Abbey in background
A recent visit to Bath provided many insights to the constancy of human nature over the millenia: people don't change.

(One good proof for there being such a thing as a human nature that sits on top of both the nature provided by the physical brain and the nurture provided by upbringing and environment, is the constancy of certain human traits wherever we find humans in all time and all cultures. Christians believe that biology and culture are not enough to explain human beings, and that we possess a soul, or spirit, which includes a common and universal human nature).

Curse tablets
Bath has three geothermal springs which the Romans thought were supernatural gifts of the gods. In one sense they weren't wrong - all good gifts are from God. Folk would come to these springs to "spiritually bathe" in the warm waters. The bathing was more than bodily enjoyment to them but a religious experience too.

They would come to Aqua Sulis, Bath's ancient name, and pray to Sulis Minerva, the local god.

What's interesting is the way they so often prayed against their enemies! Dozens of "curse tablets" have been found, each with a prayer to harm someone who had - for the most part - stolen something from them.

Here are a few examples:

 "Docimedis has lost two gloves and asks that the thief responsible should lose their minds and eyes..."

"May he who carried off Vilbia (a girl) from me become liquid as the water..."

"...so long as someone, whether slave or free, keeps silent or knows anything about it, he may be accursed in (his) blood, and eyes and every limb and even have all (his) intestines quite eaten away if he has stolen the ring or been privy (to the theft)."


Human inability to forgive is as old as the hills, and sets the command of Jesus in stark contrast - "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us." Forgiveness is truly a divine thing.

Unforgiveness is as old as the hills...and so is boasting.

Dining Room @ Number 1 Royal Crescent Bath
Boasting
At another museum in Bath there is a whole house decorated in the style of a Georgian family - and it shows us how the Georgians used to boast.

Take the dining room. This was the place where the (mainly men) would entertain their (mainly men) guests. The room would be lavishly decorated and the walls hung with family portraits to tell everyone about their fine lineage and pedigree. Unusual and expensive foods would be served to prove how wealthy they were.

They were trying to send a message to the guests to impress them. Perhaps a bust or two would show how important they or their ancestors had been. In effect, through the careful decorating of their houses they were exercising Image Control.

The family may have been close to bankruptcy, the home may have been at war, the lineage may have included a few dodgy characters -  all that was masked and hidden behind a veneer of greatness.

Modern boasting
Exactly the same happens today. People use social media to portray whatever image they wish to put forward to the world. They put on smiling photos of a happy couple, for example, even if their marriage is a mess. They put happy family pics up even if their kids are at war. They boast about their qualifications, their kids achievements, and so on, even if they sweep the roads (a very noble occupation).

They leave out all the mess to give the impression they wish to give, to control the image.

The Georgians used posh food, posh homes, busts and paintings; today we use Social Media.

Human nature does not change!

Three things flow out of this observation....

Don't believe everything you see on social media
It would be very unwise to draw any conclusions about a person's marriage, family, material or spiritual lives from social media - it could all be false. Indeed it could even be a deliberate twisting. Someone wanting to cover up an abusive marriage might, for example, put on smiling photos of the said two people, hoping that the impression they wish to give suppresses the ugly reality friends may have good reason to suspect.

One of the reasons I dislike Christmas letters is that they are simply vehicles for boasting and false image management and manipulation (which, let's be honest is telling lies).

Don't judge anyone by worldly things
We are never to think little of a poor man or much of a rich man. Replace "poor" by education/status/etc. and repeat the sentence ad infinitium.

Don't boast
But more importantly, Christians should not boast about anything. We should keep "under our hats" any qualifications, achievements, abilities, wealth, possessions, and anything else that we may think puts us in a good light and might impress others.

More importantly we must learn to not love these things, for they are "worldly." Material possesions and earthly status will play no role whatsoever in  heaven. They will be unknown in that world of light. The things the world loves and boasts about we should despise and put away, and "love not."

The apostle John says this about worldliness old and worldliness new:

"Do not love the world or anything that is in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world - the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does - comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever." (1 John 2:15-17)


Tuesday 22 October 2019

Christian Leaders old and Christian Leaders new

The Africa Bible Commentary
I will often turn to the one-volume Africa Bible Commentary for a non-Western perspective on a passage of Scripture. Western commentators have significant blindspots, which African commentators partially fill in.

For example, shaped by the scientific outlook of the West, too many Western commentators do not take the supernatural in the New Testament seriously enough, explaining it away as often as they can.

For example, wealth blinds western commentators to see the emphasis of the New Testament on caring for the poor.

I have used this commentary for years and found it often helpful. But there is a serious flaw. The flaw need not be there, but because westerners have overseen the production of the book (I guess), it's there in glaring colours, on pages xiii-xviii. What's wrong? In these pages the contributors are listed. And what information about them is it deemed necessary for us to know?

Do we find New Testament descriptions of suitability, like:

 "full of the Spirit and wisdom." (Acts 6)

or

"above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.  He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect..." (1 Timothy 3)

No! The qualifications deemed necessary to write a commentary are the following (a fictional but typical composite example):

Barnabas Adisa.  BA (University ABC), MTh (University DEF), PhD (University GHQ). Director of Charity PQR, Secretary General (for 30 years) of XYZ Church.

What's wrong, someone asks? Absolutely everything:

(1) In the Scriptures, no-one is appointed to office because of secular qualifications, indeed Jesus avoids calling any learned scribes into his team.

(2) Secular qualifications are irrelevant to one's ability to write a commentary on Scripture - and if you have absorbed liberal nonsense from one of those theological institutions, your qualifications are a distinct disadvantage.

(3) What is required is godliness and a close walk with the Lord to understand his Word, not years cooped up in some academic institution with teachers who may have never worked an ordinary day in an ordinary job in the whole of their lives, and be so far removed from real life in a real-life church that what they teach is just cerebral white noise.

(4) These boastings - for that is what they are - set a terrible precedent for future leaders who think they have to climb the greasy pole of  academia to "be useful."

(5) Ordinary Christians reading this stuff wonder if they will ever be useful in the kingdom unless they spend endless years and money doing irrelevant  - and often claptrap -  university degrees.

(6) In heaven all such letters-after-your-name stuff will be forgotten and irrelevant.

(7) Most ordinary people in the world would find these ridiculous letters incomprehensible and a barrier to faith, and a hindrance to approaching these "high and mighty ones" (as they may think they are); in the pub they'd probably have a good old hoot about them.

(8) What institutions someone has started is irrelevant to their ability to write sound Gospel commentary - for all you know they may run their institutions like the mafia (it's not unheard of).

There is a good reason Jesus chose nobodies as his Twelve disciples. There is a good reason before Paul could be useful he had to regard all his past "qualifications" as dung. Here's the reason:

God will not give his glory to another. So the Lord delights to use fishermen or tax-collectors or former church persecutors and former slave traders.

Paul had to deal with this kind of foolish worldliness in the churches of Corinth. Into those churches had infiltrated some of these pretend-to-be-something kinds, who boasted of their knowledge and powers of speech and secular stuff like that.

Instead Paul boasted about his weaknesses and his sufferings (in other words he gloried in the cross.)

If the Africa Bible Commentary is ever re-edited, they should scrap all the letters jazz and ask each contributor how and to what degree (pun intended)  they have suffered and put down those sufferings and hardships as their highest accolades. 

So here is how Barnabas Adisa should rewrite his entry, I've taken hints from 2 Corinthians 11 and Philippians, to make his bio better fit in with Scripture:

Barnabas Adisa. A hard worker. I have been beaten twenty times. I have been in and out of prison constantly for the last 20 years, and gone without food for days on end. I have many enemies, including some that have been "false brothers" - they've pretended to be my friends. I have often had sleepless nights concerned and praying for the churches and flocks. I regard as "dung" all the stuff I used to think was important, like academic qualifications. I have lost all worldly reputation for the sake of the Gospel.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to read a REAL New Testament bio? 

How far we have fallen, and we can't see it! And we wonder why most of the population view middle class  Christianity as a distant irrelevancy?

If you sense God's hand upon you for service in his kingdom, don't waste your years in some institution, evangelical or otherwise. The Lord is looking for humble diligent followers, who will automatically, led by the Spirit, be keen to read and learn and grow in the grace, as well as the knowledge, of Jesus Christ. 

John Stott
Ironically, and beautifully, and by stark contrast to every African contributor, John's Stott's foreword to the commentary has just "John Stott, December 2005." Why didn't they take a leaf out of his humble book?

In future history all the high-faluten degree-laden qualification-boasting earthly-minded leaders will be forgotten, but I bet good ol' Jonny Stott, Charlie Spurgeon,  AW Tozer and Billy Graham will be long remembered.

Wednesday 9 October 2019

The Altar at which Every Business must now Bow - or Perish

Aldi
Most Saturday mornings you'll find me at 8:00am doing the family shop in Aldi. It's cheap, you get a choice of only "10" loaves of bread rather than "100" and Aldi employees work hard: hard work is good. (Oh, and they sell interesting gadgets: it's how they pull the men, who think differently from wome, into grocery shopping).

A surprise
So I bring home the weekly mag last week and notice the front cover. It says that four "families" have swapped from one big brand to Aldi and saved themselves 35% in the process. But then you examine the photo carefully and discover that the four "families" shown are two traditional families (mother, father and children) plus two same-sex couples.

There are two most strange things about this photo

First, the stats are all way out.  Only 0.2% of all family units in the UK are same sex (34 out of every 18,997, according to ONS below). Aldi have given the impression that 50% of the population live in same-sex families, an inflation rate of a whopping 250! They would have been closer to reality if three of the couples had been traditional families and one had been a single parent family (single parent families make up 14% of family units, 2817 out of every 18,997). In this way, they would have been honouring the many hard-working single parents who no doubt shop at Aldi. So there is something very “off” about the statistics. 

Perhaps they did not mean that the two same-sex couples shown were sexually cohabiting, perhaps they are just two lady friends and two man friends who happen to live in the same houses in a platonic relationship. You could call that a “family." Mary, Martha and Lazarus lived together in a family unit in Bethany and were friends of Jesus, it would seem. (On the mission field, it is common for two lady missionary ladies to share a house, it’s cheaper and it’s company, and platonic: it is also quite possible for two men to live together as friends, and two women to live together as just friends. For many years as a student I shared a flat with a male friend.) Perhaps that is what Aldi meant. But the stats, again would be way out.

Perhaps they mean “half of all customers at Aldi are same-sex couples.” Surely the stats would not bear that one out.

No, in the present climate, Aldi does not mean “lads or lasses living together platonically shop at Aldi” or even “half  of our shoppers are same-sex couples.”

We all know exactly what Aldi mean. Aldi mean, “We support homosexuality and we support a new definition of the family that includes a couple of any combination.” 

In other words Aldi are bowing to the pressure upon every UK company to actively support homosexuality – or perish. In the Roman Empire you could believe whatever you wanted about other gods, as long as you ALSO bowed down to Caesar. It was a totalitarian state where you had to take a public line even if you believed something very different in the private of your own mind and heart and home. You could be hypocritical and half-hearted about it, but provided you worshipped the Imperial Cult in public, all was peace.  That’s what is happening in the UK. Companies are being forced to take a public line, THE PUBLIC LINE, no matter what the directors of a company might personally believe.

If they don’t, as in times of old, they’ll be thrown to the lions.

The other strange thing
There is however a sign that this magazine photo was squeezed out of Aldi perhaps reluctantly. We notice that neither of the same-sex families have children. Of course, strictly speaking that is biologically precise for a man and a man can’t have children and nor can a woman and a woman. Why did they leave out kids - an almost glaring omission? Was it because in their hearts they did not agree that same-sex families are the best environment to bring up kids? And perhaps to counter this unPC personal belief they went way way over the top statistically by multiplying the number of same-sex families in the UK by 250?  We can perhaps imagine the tension in the boardroom - or the dining room of the director and his wife.

And here is another strange thing. Why two parents in each family? Once you have set aside the complimentary man and woman, why stick to two? Why not have four men, or two women and one man?  Once you set aside the historic, common-sense, global, biological and scientific family structure of one man and one woman, there is no reason to have only two adults in each of Aldi's families.

What is a family anyway?
The Aldi Ad raises the larger question as to what a family is. There are very many good reasons why the ideal family should be made up of a  mother and a father and children. For one, that is how biology works. We should call these families biological or scientific families. Second, all alternatives are sterile by biological fact. Third, it is wise for a child to have an adult male and female role model in their lives. (I know with single parent families this isn’t always possible, but perhaps aunts and uncles can help here). Fourth, since unlike our animal counterparts, it takes many years before a human child can stand on their own feet, it is wise for the mom and dad to marry – make promises to stay together, promises that will see them through the ebbs and flows of married life, for the sake and stability of their little ones. Fifth, bringing up children is hard work (I know, I have raised four) - how much wiser to have involved in the task rather than one.

We live in an anti-biological and anti-scientific age. Biology, science, millennia of tradition all point to the common sense view that the ideal family is a man and a woman, and where God grants them little ones, children.

DATA from:  Family's UK 2017 Data