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Loving God, Suffering World?

Tsunami, Sri Lanka 2004: Morning
Rosi, a tourist recalls:

“We were on holiday and just finishing breakfast when somebody looked out of the window and commented that the sea was doing something rather strange. People started gathering to look for themselves. The sea was unusually high and seemed to be coming in closer. At first it was just a curious sight and we went over to watch as well.

All of a sudden, the sea was coming up the beach, over a wall and across the grass, and began to surround our building. Then the water level seemed to be rising. I registered how fast this was happening when I saw a lamp post knocked over directly under the restaurant. At that point, the atmosphere moved from one of curiosity to one of urgency and panic. We had no idea what was happening.

We were urged to move up some external stairs that led to the roof and so we picked up the children and swiftly made our way upwards along with some of the other guests. We stood at the top of the staircase and watched as the water rose to the level of the restaurant and ripped off parts of the balcony. All I could think of was the children. How can we hold on to them and save them? What will we do if the water gets any higher?

At this point, I prayed out loud to Jesus, asking him to save us. I tried to think about Jesus calming the storm, but this storm somehow felt too big. It was terrifying. I like to think my prayer was said in faith, but it was a desperate cry. I was really, really frightened, and couldn’t imagine God intervening.

Then the water stopped rising and started to recede. At its peak, the water had reached to where we had been eating breakfast. As we looked out, we saw muddy water everywhere. You could not make out the swimming pool from the sea. People were clinging on to palm trees for their lives. The beach where our children had played happily the day before was now an empty shell. The sea had receded, exposing the whole bay as a barren crater. We didn’t know that we had only twenty minutes before the second wave would hit.

There was a sense of urgency to get to higher ground. We moved as fast as we could, following whoever was in front, and wading past boats, fire extinguishers and other debris. No-one was talking.

When we got to the main road, it was total chaos. Every- thing seemed upside down. A car was standing upright on its nose. I saw a woman being carried towards us and felt sick with fear. We didn’t feel nearly high or safe enough and began to panic. A Sri Lankan man appeared and showed us a track into the bushes which went uphill. I remember thinking, this is what it feels like to be running for my life and the lives of my children.

We eventually reached a clearing, where there were a couple of houses. The owners were amazing, serving bananas, tea and even curry later on in the day. Most of the people from the hotel congregated there and gradually more villagers started to arrive. Everyone was in shock and mobile phones were being passed around as people tried to make contact with the outside world. Slowly the bigger picture started to emerge.

Those who returned to the hotel came back with stories of mass looting in the time between waves. Many villagers had lost loved ones. I met a lady who had two boys at her side. One of them, about ten years old, had played with my daughter on the beach. Just two days earlier, he had seemed a cheeky little boy, full of life, but now he was drenched and confused. I hardly recognized him. The woman gestured to me that she had lost a third child. I hugged her and cried with her and prayed for her. There were repeated screams of grief from one of the houses. Other people cried silently. Many did not know if their families were OK.

We were in a remote corner of Sri Lanka, with just the clothes on our back and no idea of the full scale of the disaster. I did have a sense that rescue would come, but there was absolutely nothing we could do to speed this up. We were totally dependent on the kindness of those around us, and of course God.”
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On 26 December 2004 millions watched their TV screens in disbelief as a wall of water surged onto beaches in Thailand, Indonesia and southern India, destroying homes, entire families and livelihoods. Up to 230,000 people were killed and 1.74 million displaced, and many thousands were injured or missing. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina decimated parts of New Orleans, and many other cities and neighbourhoods in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, leaving as many as 1,833 dead1 and more than a million displaced in the Gulf Coast region.2 We could also call to mind the Japan 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the devastation in Haiti in 2010, and the havoc wreaked across the Caribbean in 2018.

It is impossible to go more than a couple of months without hearing of a new disaster of some kind. And yet a large-scale natural disaster of another kind has also swept across the globe in recent years. At the time of writing, the coronavirus has infected almost 580 million people and has claimed nearly 6.5 million lives. During March and April 2020, up to a third of the world’s population was in lockdown, with huge implications for households, families and communities, not to mention educational and economic spheres. We have all been brought face to face with the global pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus.

How do we make sense of natural disasters? One of the strongest objections to the Christian faith is the question of suffering. Suffering is one of the biggest barriers to belief in God. When Christians respond, a key part of their argument is to give what is known as a free will defence and highlight that humans can make choices for ill that can bring about suffering in the lives of others. Yet, a free will defence is helpful only in accounting for what philosophers call moral evil – evil relating to how humans behave. A very different kind of response is needed to make sense of natural evil – evil that impacts the natural world itself, either through geophysics in the case of natural disasters, or through our biology in the case of disease and sickness.

Questions about natural disasters are expressed in many ways. The premise behind each question is that events such as earthquakes, tsunami and pandemics seem to happen regardless of our choices, not because of them. Even if people are responsible for their actions, we are surely not responsible for natural disasters? They are caused by forces much bigger than us. Our insurance policies protect us against ‘Acts of God’. If God exists, then why does he let them happen? Is the profound suffering and loss caused by natural disasters yet more evidence that God does not exist? (I will refer to God as ‘he’ throughout this book because the Bible consistently uses the male pronoun. This is not to infer that God is male, but rather that he is a person rather than an ‘it’.)
Broken Planet will take a closer look at some of the questions that we ask about natural disasters.

But answers and arguments that appeal to the intellect will only get us so far. We also need to hear from those with first-hand experience of earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, drought, locust infestations and pandemics, as well as from those who have experienced war, famine and refugee crises. In researching my book “Broken Planet” I spoke to many people who have experienced natural disasters around the world, humanitarian aid workers, chaplains, doctors, tourists and local residents. Some were working for NGOs to bring emergency relief in the aftermath of a disaster. Others survived the disaster itself, which yields a suffering of its own: not just flashbacks of their trauma, but also survivor’s guilt – why they survived when so many others didn’t. I included their stories in my book not simply as a supplment to the material on philosophy and science to make the book more readable; but as arguments in themselves.

In the process of taking the interviews, I was shocked to repeatedly hear that this was the first time anyone had ever asked about their experiences, and of how hard it can be to relay the trauma they have seen on the front lines of life’s worst situations to friends and family back home. For some, their stories have never been told before, and so I count it a privilege to have been able to sit with each person and listen. Some said that if their story could help someone else, then it was a story worth sharing.

However, each person featured in the book has a lived experience of faith in God and shares his or her story from this point of view. You may not share those beliefs, but my hope is that you will be able to take their perspectives on board as you think through your own questions. Even though there is much we don’t understand, each person would say that they had seen God, whom they call Jesus, at work in very real ways, even amid widespread catastrophe.
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This extract has been taken from Sharon Dirckx’s book, “Broken Planet” published by IVP, 2023 and available here.

Dr Sharon Dirckx is a freelance speaker and author and an adjunct lecturer at OCCA, The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. Originally from a scientific background, she has a PhD in brain imaging from the University of Cambridge and held research positions in the UK and USA before moving into the area of apologetics. Sharon speaks and lectures regularly and has appeared on several BBC programmes in the UK, including Radio 2’s Good Morning Sunday and Radio 4’s Beyond Belief. She is author of the award-winning book, Why?: Looking at God, evil and personal suffering, as well as Am I Just My Brain? Sharon lives in Oxford with her husband and two children.

 

Sharon Dirckx: Is There Anything Special About Being Human?

It was great that Dr Sharon Dirckx was able to join us in Hampshire for the Confident Christianity conference at Cowplain Evangelical Church. Both her career as a brain-imaging scientist and her Christian faith persuade her that humanity is something unique, precious; part of and yet distinct from the animal kingdom; and possessing a particular dignity as part of God’s design. Watch Sharon’s talk from Cowplain the link above.

 

PEP Talk with Adam White

When it comes to sharing our faith, we are blessed with a wealth of books and writings available from articulate Christians defending and presenting the gospel. Today on PEP Talk we have a great testimony from someone whose reading quest helped immensely in moving him from atheism to Christ. He now works for a Christian book distributor and gives us some great recommendations for books and evangelistic tracts we might find helpful.

With Adam White PEP Talk

Our Guest

Adam White became a Christian in 2020 after reading book after book on the evidence for Christianity. He now travels around Scotland recommending books that point people to Jesus in his role with 10ofthose.com, the Christian book ministry. Adam loves reading and has a keen interest in apologetics, spending his free time giving seminars on how to talk to atheists and engaging people in 1-2-1 evangelism.

About PEP Talk

The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.

Undercurrents: Black Mirror’s technological dystopia

Voicing fears about the direction in which technology might be taking society can seem regressive. It might even earn someone the label ‘Luddite’. That term alludes to a protest group who sabotaged textile-making machines at the turn of the nineteenth century in frustration at the far-reaching changes that those machines were set to usher in. But while it remains somewhat unfashionable to be overtly critical of the direction in which emerging technologies may be taking us, science fiction has often been the medium of choice for those wanting to explore humanity’s complicated relationship to our increasingly powerful creations.

Widely acclaimed by critics, the Netflix anthology series Black Mirror is the brainchild of the British comedian Charlie Brooker. The show opens up a number of fascinating windows on the human condition and our relationship with technology. Its name is intriguing: it alludes to the way that the screen of an electronic device is like a black mirror, perhaps hinting that the technology we are building reflects our own hopes, fears, and desires, including the darker ones.

Black Mirror’s episodes are often dystopian, occasionally comical, and at times mind-bendingly disturbing, but consistent throughout is their fiendishly clever plot twists. Each episode stands alone and is unconnected to any other episode save for some occasional and rather subtle cross-references (so-called ‘Easter eggs’), meaning that there’s no need to watch them in any particular order. Many episodes are set in the future, though usually it’s a future that isn’t too far off and isn’t too difficult to imagine being reality.

Here’s a flavour of what the series has to offer (spoiler alert!). Series 6 Episode 1 Joan is Awful features an ordinary woman, Joan, who has a bad day at work and flops down in front of the TV with her boyfriend to unwind, only to find that the new show they decide to watch is about the life of a character who looks uncannily like Joan and has a day eerily similar to hers, even down to her secret rendezvous with a previous boyfriend. The show turns Joan’s life upside down and drives her to find a way to bring down the streaming company that she learns has been using an advanced AI (the ‘Quamputer’) to generate the show based on the data Joan has been unwittingly handing over via the ever-watching cameras and microphones on her electronic devices. S2 E3 The Waldo Moment is especially prescient given that it was made in 2012 and depicts a digital character named Waldo who ends up being elected in real life as the nation’s leader after running a campaign characterised by crude, inflammatory rhetoric and obscenities directed at his opponents. S4 E2 Arkangel depicts the tragedy that eventually unfolds after a well-meaning mother decides to install a system that tracks her daughter’s every move and prevents her from ever seeing or hearing anything distressing. One of the most chilling episodes, S3 E5 Men Against Fire, introduces us to a young soldier whose unit is tasked with tracking down and executing ‘roaches’, apparently a type of monster that poses a grave threat to humanity. We learn with horror, however, that ‘roaches’ are in fact human beings who have been deemed genetically undesirable by the powers that be, and that their appearance as monsters is a digital illusion overlaid onto the unwitting soldiers’ visual fields.

In a world in which technology is increasingly heralded as holding out the promise of solving all humanity’s problems – the popular science writer and futurist Yuval Noah-Harari even claims that death is a mere technical glitch to be solved in the coming decades [i]Black Mirror offers a refreshingly candid take on the human condition and our complicated relationship with technology. The show’s creator Charlie Brooker has been clear that the point of the show is not to bash technology per se, but rather, to take a long hard look at the people using the tech. ‘Humans are weak is the story, rather than technology is evil, because I love tech’, he explained in a recent interview.[ii] Three recurring themes in the series’ commentary on human nature particularly stand out.

Perhaps the most poignant, and one that deeply resonates with a Biblical picture of the human condition, is the thought that enhancing our capabilities – be it through gaining the ability to rewind our memories like a literal video (S1 E3 The Entire History of You), having an android duplicate body so that we can be in two places at once (S6 E3 Beyond the Sea), or even uploading our minds into the cloud (S4 E6 Black Museum) – won’t necessarily make us any more virtuous as people. In fact, if anything, giving more power to flawed beings serves only to amplify our flaws and makes us more liable to damage one another and the world around us. Or in other words, the problem of the human condition is not principally one of limited capabilities but rather of misdirected desires.

Another theme that permeates the series is a sense of estrangement and alienation. Black Mirror gives voice to a feeling that many of the technologies that are supposed to be making the world ever more interconnected are actually leaving us lonely and empty. One of the saddest moments in the show occurs during S5 E2 Smithereens in which a rideshare driver kidnaps at gunpoint an intern working at the headquarters of a social media giant, and eventually reveals that his desperation is the result of losing his fiancée in a car accident he inadvertently caused while scrolling his social media feed. Black Mirror gives voice to our profound longing for connection and the way in which our relationships with one another have been marred and distorted.

A third theme is that of powerlessness in the face of seemingly unstoppable forces that we have unleashed. Many of the episodes revolve around the unforeseen consequences of technological innovations that were supposed to make life easier, but end up being twisted towards darker ends. There is even a sense that technology is gaining an agency of its own, and that its aims might not line up with our wellbeing. As the robotic killer dogs in S4 E5 Metalhead roam the post-apocalyptic landscape in search of any last remaining humans, the ominous thought lurks: at our peril do we trust in technology for salvation.

Technology per se isn’t malevolent; it is a tool and outworking of our hopes, fears, and dreams. Insofar as it is a reflection of its maker, however, we can’t expect technology to save us from ourselves. But might there be a surer foundation for hope? A source of salvation from outside the system? That, at any rate, is what Christianity claims. Our endless fascination with the human condition and the future that shows such as Black Mirror give voice suggests that it might at least be worth a look at what Christianity has to say about these themes.[iii]

[i] https://openthemagazine.com/essay/the-last-days-of-death/

[ii] https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a44197628/charlie-brooker-black-mirror-interview/

[iii] See, for example, Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense (Faber & Faber, 2012)

Justin Brierley: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God

At the Solas Confident Christianity conference at Cowplain, Justin Brierley joined us to talk about the subject of his latest book, the Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Here he charts the disintegration of New Atheism, and the way in which in search for stories which make sense of life, many people are looking again at Christianity. This includes some influential academics and thinkers who Justin has interviewed on his radio show over the last few years.

There’s more about the book and where to get a copy here.

Are Science and Faith Antithetical?

It’s often suggested that faith in God and science are contradictory – pick one, you can’t have both! But this is a popular myth. In this Short Answers video, Andy Bannister highlights how modern scientific discoveries point to the fact that the universe has been finely tuned, and points to a designer.

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Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose a free book as a thank-you gift!

How to Share Your Faith with Those Who Are Disinterested!

A team from Solas had the privilege of working with Cowplain Evangelical Church in Hampshire recently. Pastor Phill Brown and his amazing team at the church hosted us wonderfully, and it was great to be back amongst friends. Andy Bannister from Solas spoke several times over the weekend, and this talk is taken from the Confident Christianity conference we ran on the Saturday of our visit.

Andy’s subject here is how Christians can engage the apathetic in helpful spiritual conversations. Much of the Christian ‘apologetics’ developed in the era of the New Atheism seemed to assume that all non-Christian people were deeply opposed to our faith, and would be interested in vigorously debating it. That’s even less true now than it was then and there are many people who seem simply disinterested in questions of faith and meaning. In this talk, Andy shares some ways of opening dialogues with people like this’ who are often more interested in these questions than they at first seem.

“Guilty People – Merciful God”, Solas in Falkirk

All of us at Solas love visiting the churches around the country who are our friends and partners in gospel mission. Olivet Evangelical Church in Falkirk is one such fellowship who invited Gavin to speak recently. The last two occasions he has spoken there were online, during the pandemic-era, so he was especially delighted to travel to Falkirk and to renew fellowship with them in person.

The whole service was recorded and can be watched (above). Of particular interest to Solas folks will be the Solas news update from Gavin and his talk on Romans 3: 21-31, all of which begins at 18:00 minutes into the video.

Talking to Muslims – Andy on Premier Radio

Many Solas supporters and people who visit this website know that our Director, Andy Bannister did his doctoral research on the Qur’an. What is less well known is that his first book was a weighty academic tome based on his thesis. What led to his academic interest in Islam was conversations he had with many ordinary Muslims in the UK and a desire to really grapple with and understand their beliefs, which differs in several respects to his own Christian faith. This in turn led to his more popular-level book, “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?” a comparison of the Quranic and BIblical conceptions of deity.

Andy was recently invited onto Premier Radio in London, to discuss with host Maria Rodriguez how Christians should talk to their Muslim friends, colleagues and neighbours about their faith; how we can have honest, respectful dialogue, how Muslims and Christians can misunderstand one another – and how Christians can most helpfully share their faith across the divide.

The show can be listened to by clicking here.

 

It Doesn’t Have To Be Awkward! Andy on Equipped! with Chris Brooks

Solas’s Andy Bannister was a guest on Chris Brooks’ show on Moody Radio in the USA recently. The invitation came in the wake of the American publication of his book, “How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking LIke An Idiot”. While that was their starting point, the conversation was fast-paced and wide-ranging, covering many aspects of sharing our faith today.

You can hear the programme on the page at Moody Radio here.

How Do We Continue To Have Hope?

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Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose a free book as a thank-you gift!

Are You Scared To Talk About Jesus?

Theology on Tap is an online talk-show based in the USA which, “invites believers and the spiritually curious to explore big questions of life and faith.” In this episode, Andy Bannister was their guest, and the topic was one of his favourites – encouraging fruitful conversations about Jesus with those who don’t yet believe in him. It’s a lively discussion, and you can watch the whole episode above. To find out more abut Andy’s book on this subject, and how to get a copy of it, click here.

Undercurrents: Yesterday. Why we all need to be fully known and fully loved

“This is a terrible idea”, was apparently Paul McCartney’s reaction when Richard Curtis pitched him the idea for the film “Yesterday”. Curtis was not the first person to use the songs of a much-loved band as the score to a wildly improbable musical. Ben Elton had done the same to the Queen back-catalogue in London’s West End, just as Phyllida Lloyd and Catherine Johnson had done (with bonus badly singing celebrities) in Mama Mia; using the hits of ABBA. Curtis is an astute salesman, and so of course, his jukebox musical was to feature the music of biggest band of all time: The Beatles.

The plot [spoiler alert!] is as bonkers as it is implausible, as non-sensical as it is fun. And this film is an awful lot of fun.  Curtis, along with director Danny Boyle’s, interaction with the restrictions of reality are playful and endearing. While the physical plot, in which a global power-outage selectively wipes certain memories from humanity is full-on ‘Alice in Wonderland’ territory, the human interactions and emotions are relentlessly real. And that’s why the film works, it invokes friendship, loyalty, romance, dreams, hopes, fears, success, failure, love, sex and marriage. It’s a vintage Curtis rom-com!

Himesh Patel stars as Jack Malik, a small-town singer-songwriter whose career is going nowhere. The only person who thinks he can make it, is his ever-loyal friend and manager Ellie (Lily James). What’s obvious to the audience, but not Jack, is that his songs will never be hits, and that Ellie is in love with him. That is until one day when Jack wakes up in hospital after a bike accident to find that he is the only person in the world who remembers The Beatles. No one in the whole world, it seems, has ever heard of John, Paul, George or Ringo; She Loves You, Help!, Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane or Hey Jude.

The plot first thickens and then unravels. Malik starts to perform Beatles songs, and to pass them off as his own. Before long, he has said goodbye to gigging to single figure crowds in Norfolk pubs, and is on tour with Ed Sheeran. He becomes a global star, negotiating with nauseously toxic and grasping music industry bosses whose distaste for art is only dwarfed by their love of money.

The story is more complex though. The dilemma that Malik experiences is that although the world hails him as a musical genius, a pop-song writing one-man hit machine; inside he knows he’s a fraud. When he passes off Hey Jude (amusingly and naffly rendered ‘Hey Dude’ by Ed Sheeran), or beats Sheeran in a songwriting competition by claiming authorship of The Long and Winding Road; the plaudits mount. However, the further up the ladder he moves, the further from truth he finds himself – and the further from the one person who actually loves him he becomes. He jets round the world, while Ellie remains in Norfolk, she’s a primary school teacher with a parents’ night to attend.

So here, in the figure of Jack Malik, Curtis and Boyle give us a character enduring the most intense ‘imposter syndrome’ of all time. He wakes up in cold sweats, dreading being found out. He dreams he’s on James Corden’s chat show and Paul and Ringo appear claiming the songs back! He loves the adulation, the hits, the stardom, the screaming girls of Malik-mania, and the feeling of importance but dreads being found out for who he really is.

This taps in to something very profound within most of us. Psychologists say that one of the most common dreams people experience is of being naked in public – the fruit of a slumbering imagination let run riot with feelings of not fitting in, or being found out. Sometime such feelings are without foundation. I remember reading of a brilliant young scientist who, despite her glittering academic career, felt like an ill-qualified imposter in her lab. Or a hugely impressive student who (despite being a serial over-achiever) dreaded being found out as the failure she perceived herself to be, and getting thrown out of university for poor marks.

Yet often these feelings of being an imposter are based on things not imagined, but very real. We may not find ourselves standing in front of tens of thousands of people passing off other people’s work as our own. We may have written our own theses (or film reviews!) and not indulged in Jack Malik scale acts of plagiarism. Nevertheless, many people live with a dread of being found out for who they really are – what they have actually done.

Social media, in all its many forms has exacerbated this phenomenon. Not only do people now need to present themselves as good-looking, interesting and smart from nine-to-five, but must also compete in the best life stakes, alongside the carefully curated narratives of any number of online ‘friends’, and ‘followers’. I remember speaking to one man, who was inconsolably miserable – but whose social media profile looked for all the world as if he was living the dream. All the while he believed everyone else’s online narratives as literal truth, and dreaded being found out for being the fraud he was.

And to a lesser or greater extent we all do it. We speak about the things we are proud of, and hide the things of which we are ashamed. We present a version of ourselves to the world, which is often little more than an aspiration of the kind of person we wish we truly were. All the while we keep people at a distance, fearing that if they found out who we really are, they would reject us. The result is the crisis of loneliness our culture inhabits, in which profound relationships in the real world require a vulnerability that is easier to avoid, but the stylised and manicured online relationships we prefer do not satisfy. The human ego proves to be balloon-like, and the more puffed-up we get – the more we dread it bursting.

So Jack Malik – the plagiarist in chief – faces a dilemma. In front of him are the crowds, the adulation and the glorious lie. Somewhere off stage stands Ellie Appleton, the beautiful, loyal, wonderful girl who loves the real Jack, who was there in the empty festivals in the rain, the pub-gigs that no-one came to and who knows the songs the Jack actually did write, and which no-one cares about.  In front of Jack is the lie, the money, the fame and the fraud. To the side, is Ellie – who represents grace, because she both knows and loves the ‘real Jack’.

Richard Curtis has built his career on knowing how to tug the heart strings of his audience. From Blackadder’s final charge in WWI, to William Thacker walking through a snowy Notting Hill to the strains of Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone; Curtis isn’t even subtle in the way he cheerfully plays with his audiences sympathies. It’s no different here. We all know that there are elements of our lives which are a bit dodgy, things in our minds, phones and accounts which we would not want broadcast in front of the crowd – or displayed on social media. There are cruel ways we have spoken to those we love most, which if recorded and shared online would make us die a thousand deaths. There are things we deliberately conceal, yet, we also know that unless we are truly known, we are always terribly, terribly alone.

So Jack Malik makes a choice. Deciding that he cannot cope with living the lie, he confesses, not just to Ellie, and the management of his record label; but to the whole world – live on stage. Confession opens the door to embracing Ellie (actually to marriage, kids and Oblha-di, Oblha-da), the one person who knew and loved the real Jack. The film comes to its happy ending with Jack and Ellie in a relationship built on grace, not on his performance. And this is the one place in which he finds himself freed from Imposter syndrome. At home with Ellie, Jack knows he truly belongs in a way he never did in the record company offices, and in the executive jets.

Richard Curtis and co, seem to perfectly understand one of the core dilemmas in the human condition – that we need to be simultaneously fully known, and fully loved and accepted. This resonates very deeply with us all. Their proposed solution to this problem is romance, that we find the perfect mate, and become complete. It is unrelentingly romantic, soppy and makes Yesterday not merely a quirky fantasy, but a vintage feelgood rom-com.

The problem of course is that if we look to romance, even to the covenantal romance of marriage, to fully meet these deep and profound needs we will be disappointed. The need to be totally accepted while being fully known, is profound – but it might be an overwhelming burden if placed on the shoulders of another human being. Who has the infinite resources of grace to fully and completely love another, when all their faults are revealed? Equally, who can allow their innermost recesses to be exposed when the contents are unpalatable even to oneself? Curtis can make us feel good, with his rom-com view of the world, but he also sets us up for bitter disappointment if we take him too seriously.

The good news though, is that even if one human being can never give us all the grace we need – this is precisely what God offers us. The wonder of the message of Christ is that God already fully knows us (every fault, every thought, every motive, deed and word) and yet despite that does not recoil from us in horror; but choses to embrace us completely. To walk with Him is to be fully and completely known, and yet fully and completely accepted. There is no imposter syndrome in God’s kingdom because the whole basis of membership is that we receive his grace, which we don’t deserve. And yet we don’t stumble into it by accident. Jack Malik in Yesterday has to opt out of the lie, confess his dreadful plagiarism and choose Ellie. This is a neat analogy of what God calls us to do. Stop living the lie, stop pretending to be something we are not, stop covering up our faults and instead confess them to him; casting ourselves upon his immeasurable grace. Because it is there that we find our true home, where we really belong. Only God can simultaneously fully know us and yet fully love us like this. The rom-com world of Richard Curtis and Yesterday is cute, but it overburdens human romance with a promise that only God can fulfil.

Five Steps To Answer Any Tough Question – Andy at the E.L.F.

Faced with difficult or complex questions, many Christians are tempted to avoid conversation and go into fight or flight mode! In this talk from the European Leadership Forum, Andy Bannister outlines an alternative to either running away, or being defensive and beligerent. In his five-steps approach he explains how in the face of tough questions and objections, Christians have wonderful opportunities to talk about Jesus -and don’t have to know all the answers to every philosophical puzzle to do so. After his talk he was asked several questions, and you can watch his responses here:
  1. What is the S.H.A.R.E. method and how is it helpful in answering difficult questions?
  2. What are the crucual foundations to answering tough questions?
  3. Why has the church had a bad reputation when it comes to answering tough questions?

Are All Religions the Same?

It’s common to assume that all religions are essentially the same, and therefore we can respect their diversity in our pluralistic society. Is that really giving religious beliefs the respect they deserve, or is it actually an ignorant and patronising approach? In this Short Answers episode, Andy Bannister encourages us to respect each other in our real differences and realise that the truth is worth pursuing through open discussion and mutual respect.

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Please share this video widely with friends or family and for more Short Answers videos, visit solas-cpc.org/shortanswers/, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit us on Twitter Instagram or Facebook.

Support

Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose a free book as a thank-you gift!