We have just begun filming the exciting new series of Short Answers videos and the first episodes will be released over the next few weeks right here and through our social media channels. In the meantime, two of our most popular ever Short Answers have been about Easter. As we approach the Easter season, enjoy these—but why not share them on social media, or show them to friends, colleagues and family as discussion starters?
I’m from a non-Christian background. None of my family were believers. However, like many people, I thought about and discussed religious matters with my friends in my teens – but never came to any clear conclusions. I suppose I parked the “big questions” on God and Jesus in a file in the back of my head with a view to thinking about them later – but never did.
So through my 20’s and 30’s, I guess I had the view of many people in the UK today that I really didn’t know what to think about God and Jesus. I suppose I thought that you probably needed to have some form of faith to be a Christian – and that this faith was for other people. Perhaps people who had been brought up Christians. Or perhaps, people who had experienced some form of life-changing spiritual experience. Neither situation applied to me.
I would never have called myself an atheist though. To me, there seemed insufficient evidence for the non-existence of God to come to such a definite conclusion. Equally, there also seemed to be insufficient evidence for the existence of God for me to conclude He definitely existed. I was therefore a resolute agnostic.
However, in my late 30’s I thought it would be worthwhile revisiting some of the questions I’d left unresolved in my teens. My thoughts were that there are plenty of capable and intelligent people who profess to have some form of belief in God. For example, scientists like Francis Collins (Head of the US National Genome Research Institute) and William D Phillips (Winner of the Nobel prize for Physics 1997) or world leaders like Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama.
I remember reading about a survey published in “Nature”, where four out of ten scientists said they believed in God. OK, just over 45% said they didn’t believe, and 14.5% described themselves as doubters or agnostics. However, a figure of 40% surprised me. Why did they believe?
Also, if I looked at the religious leaders in this country, they were clearly intelligent men or women. If these people had some belief in God, then perhaps it was worthwhile looking at this again to find out why.
At this time I met a colleague on a business trip to the USA who also happened to be a Christian. I wasn’t aware of this until I asked him where he had been on holiday that year. He replied that he had been over to Oxford in the UK on missionary work. As you might imagine, this sparked my curiosity and the conversation turned to the spiritual questions I’d started to revisit. The result of the conversation was that he said that he’d send me a few books which might help with the questions I had. Sure enough, two weeks later I received a package containing a copy of “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel and a Bible.
Now, did reading “The Case for Christ” turn me into a Christian? Well frankly, no it didn’t.
However, what it did do was act as the starting point for my own investigation into who Jesus is. I was amazed by what I found. I was amazed by my own ignorance of the evidence. How could I be living in a “Christian” country and not be aware of this stuff?
The more I looked, the more I found compelling historical and rational evidence for Jesus being the Son of God. However, I still wasn’t a follower. The reason was simple: I assumed there would be equally strong atheistic evidence and counter-arguments which would no doubt keep me in my resolutely agnostic state.
So I started to look (really look) for this atheistic evidence on Jesus. I trawled bookshops for books on atheism. I scoured atheist websites. I read detailed, hostile reviews of “The Case for Christ”. I listened to and read articles and interviews with well known atheists. I read the New Testament for myself. I read biographies and critiques of Jesus by non-Christians. I did this when I was an agnostic. I still do this today as a follower of Jesus.
What was the result of all this research? What surprised and challenged me was the strength of the evidence for Jesus versus the evidence against. This provided the greatest push for me make the step from agnosticism to becoming follower of Jesus.
As you might imagine, there were other key moments in my journey to faith in Jesus. Also, becoming a follower of Jesus transformed (and continues to transform) my life for the better. However it’s the compelling evidence for Jesus being who He said He was which reversed me out of my agnostic cul-de-sac and set me off on my journey to faith in Him.
I have a science and engineering background. I’m the type of person who needs the facts to make up my mind on anything.
There are plenty of people in the world like me. Once I became a Christian, I remembered the time and effort it had taken to amass the evidence I’d found. I thought: “Wouldn’t it be great if this was collected in one place and in language a non-Christian could engage with?”
This is what prompted me to put together the Jesus: The Evidence materials, which are available on the web, and published in a booklet. I sometimes deliver these as a live presentation too.
I did all this to make it easier for non-Christians to engage with the evidence for Jesus. However, I always say to non-Christians: “Don’t take my word for it. Do your own research!” If you think what I’ve written is biased, or doesn’t fully answer your questions, find out for yourself. You owe it to yourself to do this and perhaps experience the type of positive transformation a relationship with Jesus brings.
Solas is excited to announce that we are actively searching for a gifted speaker to join our ministry. We need someone to work with the growing Solas team to help fulfill the speaking, writing and teaching obligations of Solas (both in terms of evangelism and evangelism training) throughout the country and, where required, further afield.
We are looking for someone with clear evangelistic and apologetic gifts, with a proven ability to engage both non-Christian and Christian audiences, as well as experience of public speaking, writing and teaching. If you or someone you know might be interested in this opportunity, please read or share the full Solas Speaker job description here.
This is a full-time, paid position based in Dundee, Scotland.
For more information, please contact our Chief Operating Officer, Alan Dunn, using the form below.
The creative output of comedian, writer, director and actor Ricky Gervais is always worthy of some consideration. His past successes with The Office and Extras were due in no small part to his ability to see the everyday banalities of modern life, the petty significance of people’s experiences, and to render them with starkness and a subtly belated pathos. His writing is uncomfortable and angular, he is willing to use silences and particles of speech which seldom reach a script, and the outrageousness of some of his characters is only ever a slight exaggeration. Precisely because of these factors, the release on Netflix of After Life still felt like an important ‘television’ moment. The trailers showed a taciturn Gervais evidently world-worn and life-weary, facing up to the reality of grief, of life after the life of a loved one.
The result is at once poignant and polemical, daring and disappointing. As one would expect, the writing and acting is of the first order with a steady naturalism in how things are phrased and delivered. Gervais manages to portray mourning without excessive moping, turning out a brilliantly realised widower who is genuinely struggling to re-order his life in the wake of horrendous loss. The issues of suicide and alcoholism are brutally but sympathetically handled, and the little inflections of frustration with modern life (his character Tony’s encounters with the postman for example) are clever and recognisable. The rest of the cast do a brilliant job, creating a group of people who are part of the main character’s world, but who have excellent and disarming back stories of their own. The pace of the drama is also spot-on, and Gervais’ willingness to plant seeds of his plot which germinate throughout the series is both ambitious and believable. Given Gervais’ status it would have been easy to turn out a comedy series which didn’t take the pains which After Life has done, but there is little sense that he is resting on past capital in the writing and production here.
The poignancy of the drama is, however, somewhat thrown out of balance by its polemical preoccupations. Gervais’ atheism is given ample air time (which, as a Christian, is fine by me) but only in environments where it can be affirmed rather than intelligently probed. There are a few easy bouts between Tony and a colleague whose apologetics are somewhat lacking, offering him paragraphs of room to ruminate on the place of Christianity in a pluralistic world and the feasibility of ethical living in the absence of absolutes. In one sense it is refreshing to engage with a drama which enters this territory, but the handling here is neither believable nor deft.
This is particularly disappointing given the conceit behind the drama. I would have loved to watch a drama in which an individual works through the realities of grief from the vantage point of an atheistic worldview, where there was some sense of tension or even a small degree of wrestling with what it means to lose someone if the only ‘after life’ is that lived by those who are bereaved. Instead we get a series of monologues straight from the outdated and philosophically unsophisticated playbook of Richard Dawkins.
That disappointment is also sustained by some of the context and conclusions which After Life offers. Far from portraying grief in grey or gritty terms, the series’ world is permanently sun-lit and serene. Tony lives in a fictional town which is lightly populated, he works a dead-end job but is obviously affluent, giving the whole sequence of events a dream-like, heavenly feel. This is undoubtedly intentional, but one has to question the creative ambition behind this. Are we being consoled that grieving without God and without future hope is hard but ultimately enlightened? Are we really probing the pain of personal loss by using utopia as a backdrop?
The conclusions of the drama are as sunny as the summer bleached pavements on which it unfolds. At the opening of After Life Tony is at war with the world, standing up to opportunist thieves, feeling irked by other people’s eating habits, threatening a school bully with being bludgeoned to death with a hammer, starkly rejecting a date, showing impatience with his elderly father, and knowingly helping someone else to commit suicide. So far, so fearless. But the gradual turn around in Tony’s life is hard to quantify against these earlier behaviours, his empathy for others seeming to be restored through conversations with an elderly widow and a feckless psychotherapist. The resolution to the drama is vacuously redemptive with Tony’s goodness turning around the lives of all who are in his orbit. He resolves to treat others well as a means of grace, reserving his ire only for those who deserve to be handled with contempt.
This is all too easy. It is such a shame that a programme which purports to probe grief, which interrogates God, which heralds humanism, is so lacking in self-awareness and auto-critique. Gervais writes as though Beckett never had, as though existential angst is a thing of the past, as though creation simply awaits its redemption through human good. This is desperately naive, and utterly insufficient to face the true realities of living in the rough stuff of a broken world. Gervais does not want God but he longs for good, he does not want absolutes but he does want altruism, he wants to talk about grief but only as a vehicle for humanistic grace. There are depths to loss which are not plumbed here, there are anxieties and contradictions and cross-pressures which plague our existence as human beings, there are deep wounds which cannot be healed lightly, and After Life does little to address or grapple with any of this.
Andrew Roycroftis pastor of Millisle Baptist Church in Co. Down. N. Ireland, and blogs at www.thinkingpastorally.com
I recently had the privilege of speaking at Edinburgh University. This time though, it was not at any of the campus Christian groups, but at the Edinburgh University Islamic Society. The way that meeting came about is remarkable! One of my old Canadian colleagues was holidaying in Edinburgh and whilst there, went on a walking tour. The tour was led by a Muslim university student and my friend happened to remark to her that “My old colleague Andy Bannister is based here in Scotland now, and he’s unusual because he’s a Christian but his PhD is in Islamic Studies.” This woman was fascinated and said, “Maybe we should get Andy to come and speak to our Islamic Society at some point, because we are trying to do more events where we engage with people of other faiths” and they exchanged contact details. Four months later, an email landed on my desk from the Islamic Society saying, “We’re having an inter-faith week, and would I be interested in sharing and engaging with them?” And I said, “Of course!”
The talk I came and gave to the Muslim audience at the university was titled “Mutual Misunderstandings Between Christians and Muslims”. Over the course of 45 minutes, I took three common misunderstandings that Christians often have about Muslims, and then three misunderstandings that Muslims often have about Christians.
First, we examined the fact that many Christians think that all Muslims are violent, which is not fair or accurate understanding of Islam. Yes, there are some jihadi groups in Islam, but they are not the only ones.
Second, I looked at the way that Christians misunderstand Islam and politics. In the West, we tend to separate religion and politics, religion and state; by contrast, Islam doesn’t tend to make those distinctions. Muhammad was both a political and a religious leader and so in Islam those two categories are combined and that confuses many Christians.
Third, I spoke about how Christians misunderstand the Muslim view of Muhammad; sometimes Christians mistakenly think that Muslims worship Muhammad, which of course they don’t. At the same time, Christians often don’t understand the huge respect and love for Muhammad that Muslims have, which is why they get so angry when he is attacked or insulted, or people draw cartoons of him.
Having looked at ways Christians sometimes misunderstand Islam, I shifted to talking about the three major misunderstandings that many Muslims have about Christians, and I think these are deeper and more significant.
I began by tackling the fact that many Muslims tend assume that all Westerners are Christian. That means Muslims often look at the things that are wrong in the West (e.g. sexual immorality, violence etc.) and think that those things are ‘Christian.’ So we disentangled that a little bit. At the same time, many Muslims fail to appreciate that for Christians, conversion is a personal decision. You are not a Christian because you were born in a Christian country, or born to Christian parents; rather you have to have a personal point of deciding to follow Christ to be a Christian. So that gave me the opportunity to share what commitment to Christ looks like.
The second Muslim misunderstanding of Christianity is that they misunderstand the Bible. They frequently think that it has been corrupted and changed. However, I showed the Muslims in Edinburgh that that idea is not actually in the Qur’an (which strongly affirms the Bible in many verses)—rather it is an idea that developed about 200 years later in Islam, arising during the debates between Muslims and Christians in the 2nd century of Islam. In fact, if Muslims took their own Qur’an seriously, it would challenges them to take the Bible seriously. I also talked the audience through a lot of the recent critical work on the early manuscripts of the Qur’an, which reveal the many textual variants and scribal changes in the early text. Many Muslims assume they have a “perfect text” with no difficult textual issues—I gently deconstructed that assumption.
And third and finally, I spoke about how Muslims often misunderstand Jesus. Many Muslims think that Christians have taken a mere man and elevated him to a position of deity. I said that that actually fails to understand the words of Jesus himself: the reason that Christians believe what we do about Jesus because of his own words and actions. Many of Jesus’s words would have been blasphemous if he wasn’t God (such as forgiving sin, for example). All of Jesus’s claims about himself culminate in Jesus’s trial before Caiaphas the High Priest, where Jesus was outrightly accused of blasphemy and asked, “Are you the Son of God?” Rather than say, “no”, Jesus quoted Daniel chapter 7, about the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory, which is an incredible passage which claims divinity. When Caiaphas heard this, he tore his robe, and cried, “Blasphemy!” and sentenced Jesus to death. So, Jesus’s whole life and ministry was about this claim that he is more than a man, and of course the authorities knew what he was claiming and crucified him for it. Now if Jesus has stayed dead that would have been that, but he rose from the dead three days later, the divine vindication of the claims Jesus had made.
It was an incredible privilege to be standing in front of an almost entirely Muslim audience, unpacking the scriptures and sharing about Jesus. After the talk, we launched straight into the Q&A and it was very friendly, but pretty lively! Many of the Muslim audience had never heard any of this stuff, more than one of them saying they’d never heard a Christian explain and defend what Christians believed.
Perhaps the topic that drew the most the questions were the critical issues on the Qur’an. Muslims are fond of pointing to textual variants in biblical manuscripts, but I simply pointed out that all ancient texts have variants in their manuscripts, including the Qur’an (I have 3,000 or more on my computer, easily accessible and browsable through the Qur’an Gateway software package). The question is not “does a text have variants?” but “has the scholarship been done to ensure we can trust the text we have today?” Christians have always been open and honest about our manuscripts and indeed it is Christians who have built the best tools for studying biblical manuscripts. By contrast, Muslims have tended to ignore or hide the issues in early Qur’an manuscripts, which is why we are only finally now seeing good computer databases of early Qur’an manuscript variants made available. When I put some of these textual variants up on PowerPoint slides in Edinburgh, there were at times almost audible gasps from the audience who had never seen these kind of problems in their earliest manuscripts.
Overall, the talk in Edinburgh was a wonderful opportunity to engage our Muslim friends. I have been dialoguing and engaging with Muslims for over 20 years now, and they are always wonderfully welcoming, friendly people—who often ask fantastically good questions. I’ve been asked to come and speak again for them and I look forward to that. Too often Christians avoid Muslims or are afraid of them, thus it’s hardly surprising that many Muslims have no idea what the Christian faith really is.
If you’d like to think about how you can share your faith and talk about Jesus with Muslim friends or colleagues, I can highly recommend the book Reaching Muslims: A One-Stop Guide for Christians by my friend Nick Chatrath.
Sometimes incidents cluster together and you realise you’re not just looking at a few coincidences, you’re not even looking at a trend, you’re looking at the new normal.
Complex though they are, a series of recent events crystallised this for me. There was the shame-hunt against Kevin Hart, hounded out of hosting 2019’s un-hosted Oscars for something that he said ten years ago, and has since apologised for. There were the social media attacks on the Superbowl’s half-time artists, and former civil rights marcher Gladys Knight, for singing the national anthem, both thereby apparently failing to take a stand against racism. And there was the cyber-shaming of Liam Neeson because he confessed that, after a close friend was raped by a black man 40 years ago, he’d wanted to kill a black man. He hadn’t done it, but admitted, to his own horror, he’d considered it.
Some would argue, including John Barnes, one of England’s first black professional footballers, that Neeson should be applauded for his honesty. After all, we won’t get anywhere by pretending that we never feel prejudice, that there is no smidgen of sulphur in our hearts. And we won’t get anywhere when every syllable in our public discourse is CAT-scanned and MRI-ed for any atom of possible prejudice. 34 years after Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four predicted, the thought police have arrived – they just don’t work for the state.
In 1985, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, reflecting on two mid-century fictional visions: Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley believed our addiction to pleasure would enslave us, Orwell that our fears would. Postman argued that Huxley was right. I doubt he’d argue that now. Today, the laudable commitment of liberal democracies to inclusion and diversity risks morphing from protest to no-platforming to illiberalism and totali-shame-ism.
And here’s the thing. There’s no forgiveness, no mercy, no forgetting. Just a relentless drive to judge and denounce.
All this serves to highlight the majestic, counter-cultural grace of the gospel. Yes, God is a God of justice, opposed to the degrading of any human on any grounds. Yes, he has seen our every furtive action, picked up every sly whisper, logged every darkling thought… yet his mercy flows from the cross like an ocean, drenching the universe. As today’s Pharisees rage, God’s offer is ‘mercy, mercy, mercy’ to all who would repent and receive him. And our watchwords: grace, truth, love, and courage.
Mark GreeneMark is the Executive Director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (www.licc.org.uk). This article was previously published as part of their weekly “Connecting with Culture” series, and is reproduced with their kind permission.
About 240 men from across Scotland recently gathered for the Christian Men Together conference in Glasgow. I was speaking alongside Ian Coffey, the Director of Leadership Training at Moorlands College. We spoke about how we guys can engage the culture, share our faith and be “Salt and Light” in the secular world.
I spoke about how they can engage their friends more naturally in conversations about faith by using great conversations and apologetics. We’ve found that if you can teach people to ask good questions, amazing conversations about the gospel can happen. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that that’s the approach that Jesus used consistently in the gospels.
In my second session, I took a look at two commonly asked tough questions: “Why would a good God send people to hell?” and “There are so many other religions in the world, how can we know that Christianity is true?” We also explored the best approaches to use in answering all kinds of questions, equipping the men to be more effective, confident witnesses for Jesus.
Since the conference, we’ve had emails from people saying how helpful it was and that they are putting this into practice. That’s really what we are about at Solas, getting Christians equipped and excited about evangelism. We believe that the effects of a conference like Christian Men Together can ripple out, right across Scotland, as Christians get bolder about sharing their faith at work, or with their friends.
Fear seems to be the biggest thing holding us back in evangelism today. It occurred to me a few years ago that there are lots of situations in life when we are afraid, but we keep going anyway! I’ve been a bit of a rock-climber for many years, but still I hate abseiling down after a climb. Why do I still do it, even though dangling on a rope over a sheer drop terrifies me? Because I have done just enough training to know what to do. More importantly though, I trust the person on the other end of the rope.
I think the same is true of evangelism. Fear doesn’t have to be paralysing—if you know just enough in terms of helpful approaches, and have a few tools for good conversations, you can see some amazing things happen. But ultimately though, it’s about knowing that God has “got the other end of the rope”. It’s not our job to win people for Christ, it’s our job to be the most effective ambassadors we can. God does the rest of the work and has got the other end of the rope. Grasping these principles helps people to see that evangelism really isn’t impossible!
These messages worked well alongside Ian Coffey’s emphasis on The Beatitudes and Christian character. Sharing the gospel, and showing the character of Christ are two things which really need to go together. I was reminded of 1 Peter 3:15-16—“always be prepared to give an answer for the hope you have, but do this with gentleness and respect”. If you try giving a reason for the hope you have, using all the right “techniques”—but you are an angry, obnoxious person—people are not going to respond. On the other hand, I think a more common error that Christians make is that they think, “If I am a really nice person, at home, at work, and in the neighbourhood, people will get that this is because I’m a Christian.” Sadly though, it doesn’t work, they’ll just assume that you are a nice person. You could be a nice humanist, or a nice Buddhist or a nice Muslim! We need both Christian character, and the courage of our convictions to talk about what we believe. Put those together, and it’s very powerful, it’s 1 Peter 3!
It’s the first time that I’ve spoken at the Christian Men Together Conference in Glasgow, but it was a return visit for Solas because David Robertson has spoken there before. We really appreciate their work, and enjoy our ongoing relationship with them.
I am often told that the trouble with believers in God is just that: they are believers. That is, they are people of faith. Science is far superior because it doesn’t require faith. It sounds great. The problem is, it could not be more wrong.
Let me tell you about an encounter I had with Peter Singer, a world-famous ethicist from Princeton University in the USA. He is an atheist, and I debated with him in his home city of Melbourne, Australia, on the question of the existence of God. In my opening remarks, I told the audience what I told you earlier: that I grew up in Northern Ireland and that my parents were Christians.
Singer’s reaction was to say that this was an example of one of his objections to religion—that people tend to inherit the faith in which they were brought up. For him, religion is simply a matter of heredity and environment, not a matter of truth. I said,
“Peter, can I ask you—were your parents atheists?”
“My mother was certainly an atheist. My father was maybe more agnostic,” he replied.
“So you’re perpetuating the faith of your parents too, like I am,” I said.
“It’s not faith, in my view,” he said.
“Of course it’s a faith—don’t you believe it?” I replied.
There was much laughter.
Not only that but, as I discovered later, cyberspace lit up with the question: doesn’t Peter Singer, a famous philosopher, realise that his atheism is a belief system? Has he never heard of people, like the cosmologist Allan Sandage, who became convinced by the evidence of the existence of God and converted to Christianity later in life?
Many leading atheists share Singer’s confusion about faith and, as a result, make equally absurd statements. “Atheists do not have faith,”[note]The God Delusion, p 51.[/note] says Richard Dawkins, and yet his book The God Delusion is all about what he believes—his atheist philosophy of naturalism in which he has great faith. Dawkins, like Singer, thinks that faith is a religious concept that means believing where you know there is no evidence. They are quite wrong. Faith is an everyday concept, and they give the game away by frequently using it as such.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word comes from the Latin fides, which means loyalty or trust. And, if we have any sense, we don’t normally trust facts or people without evidence. After all, making well-motivated, evidence-based decisions is just how faith is normally exercised—think of how you get your bank manager to trust you or the basis for your decision to get on board a bus or an aircraft.
Believing where there is no evidence is what is usually called blind faith; and no doubt in all religions you will find adherents who believe blindly. Blind faith can be very dangerous—witness 9/11. I cannot speak for other religions, but the faith expected on the part of Christians is certainly not blind. I would have no interest in it otherwise.
The Gospel-writer John says: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” John, chapter 20, verses 30-31
John is telling us that his account of the life of Jesus contains the eyewitness record of evidence on which faith in Christ can be based. Indeed, a strong case can be made that much of the material in the Gospels is based on eyewitness testimony.[note]See R. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2017)[/note]
This confusion about the nature of faith leads many people to another serious error: thinking that neither atheism nor science involves faith. Yet, the irony is that atheism is a belief system and science cannot do without faith.
Physicist Paul Davies says that the right scientific attitude is essentially theological: “Science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview”. He points out that “even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith [emphasis mine] … a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us”.[note] Templeton Prize Address, 1995, goo.gl/bXag3s (accessed 11 July 2018).[/note]
Albert Einstein famously said: “… science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive a genuine man of science without that profound faith [emphasis mine]. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” [note]www.nature.com/articles/146605a0.pdf (accessed 23 October 2018).[/note]
Einstein evidently did not suffer from Dawkins’ delusion that all faith is blind faith. Einstein speaks of the “profound faith” of the scientist in the rational intelligibility of the universe. He could not imagine a scientist without it. For instance, scientists believe (= have faith) that electrons exist and that Einstein’s theory of relativity holds because both are supported by evidence based on observation and experimentation.
My lecturer in quantum mechanics at Cambridge, Professor Sir John Polkinghorne, wrote, “Science does not explain the mathematical intelligibility of the physical world, for it is part of science’s founding faith [notice his explicit use of the word] that this is so…”[note]J. Polkinghorne, Reason and Reality (SPCK, 1991), p 76.[/note] for the simple reason that you cannot begin to do physics without believing in that intelligibility.
On what evidence, therefore, do scientists base their faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe, which allows them to do science? The first thing to notice is that human reason did not create the universe. This point is so obvious that at first it might seem trivial; but it is, in fact, of fundamental importance when we come to assess the validity of our cognitive faculties. Not only did we not create the universe, but we did not create our own powers of reason either. We can develop our rational faculties by use; but we did not originate them. How can it be, then, that what goes on in our tiny heads can give us anything near a true account of reality? How can it be that a mathematical equation thought up in the mind of a mathematician can correspond to the workings of the universe?
It was this very question that led Einstein to say, “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible”. Similarly the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner once wrote a famous paper entitled, “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”.[note]Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. 1, February 1960 (John Wiley & Sons).[/note] But it is only unreasonable from an atheistic perspective. From the biblical point of view, it resonates perfectly with the statements: “In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was God … All things came to be through him” (John 1 v 1, 3).
Sometimes, when in conversation with my fellow scientists, I ask them “What do you do science with?”
“My mind,” say some, and others, who hold the view that the mind is the brain, say, “My brain”.
“Tell me about your brain? How does it come to exist?”
“By means of natural, mindless, unguided processes.”
“Why, then, do you trust it?” I ask. “If you thought that your computer was the end product of mindless unguided processes, would you trust it?”
“Not in a million years,” comes the reply.
“You clearly have a problem then.”
After a pregnant pause they sometimes ask me where I got this argument—they find the answer rather surprising: Charles Darwin. He wrote: “…with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”[note]Letter to William Graham, 3rd July 1881. The University of Cambridge Darwin Correspondence project, goo.gl/Jfyu9Q (accessed 28th June 2018).[/note]
Taking the obvious logic of this statement further, Physicist John Polkinghorne says that if you reduce mental events to physics and chemistry you destroy meaning. How?
For thought is replaced by electrochemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong—they simply happen. The world of rational discourse disappears into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly that can’t be right and none of us believe it to be so.[note]One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology (SPCK, 1986), p 92.[/note] Polkinghorne is a Christian, but some well-known atheists see the problem as well.
John Gray writes: “Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth—and so be free. But if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth”.[note]Straw Dogs (Granta Books, 2002), p 26.[/note]
Another leading philosopher, Thomas Nagel, thinks in the same way. He has written a book, Mind and Cosmos, with the provocative subtitle Why the Neo-Darwinian View of the World is Almost Certainly False. Nagel is a strong atheist who says with some honesty, “I don’t want there to be a God”. And yet he writes: “But if the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be fully explained by physical science. Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.”[note]Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos (OUP, 2012), p 14 [/note]
That is, naturalism, and therefore atheism, undermines the foundations of the very rationality that is needed to construct or understand or believe in any kind of argument whatsoever, let alone a scientific one. Atheism is beginning to sound like a great self-contradictory delusion —“a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence”.
Of course, I reject atheism because I believe Christianity to be true. But I also reject it because I am a scientist. How could I be impressed with a worldview that undermines the very rationality we need to do science? Science and God mix very well. It is science and atheism that do not mix.
Another way of looking at this is to think once more about explanation. We are often taught in science that a valid explanation seeks to explain complex things in terms of simpler things. We call such explanation “reductionist” and it has been successful in many areas. One example is the fact that water, a complex molecule, is made up of the simpler elements hydrogen and oxygen.
However, reductionism doesn’t work everywhere. In fact, there is one place where it does not work at all. Any full explanation of the printed words on a menu, say, must involve something much more complex than the paper and ink that comprise the menu. It must involve the staggering complexity of the mind of the person who designed the menu. We understand that explanation very well. Someone designed the menu, however automated the processes are that led to the making of the paper and ink and carrying out the printing.
The point is that when we see anything that involves language-like information, we postulate the involvement of a mind. We now understand that DNA is an information-bearing macromolecule. The human genome is written in a chemical alphabet consisting of just four letters; it is over 3 billion letters long and carries the genetic code. It is, in that sense, the longest “word” ever discovered. If a printed, meaningful menu cannot be generated by mindless natural processes but needs the input of a mind, what are we to say about the human genome? Does it not much more powerfully point to an origin in a mind—the mind of God?
Atheist philosophy starts with matter/energy (or, these days, with “nothing”) and claims that natural processes and nature’s laws, wherever they came from, produced from nothing all that there is—the cosmos, the biosphere and the human mind. I find this claim stretches my rationality to breaking point, particularly when it is compared with the biblical view that:
In the beginning was the Word … the Word was God … All things were made through him… John 1 v 1,3
This Christian worldview resonates first with the fact that we can formulate laws of nature and use the language of mathematics to describe them. Secondly, it sits well with the discovery of the genetic information encoded in DNA. Science has revealed that we live in a word-based universe, and we have gained that knowledge by reasoning.
C.S. Lewis argues this point saying that “unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.” If ultimate reality is not material, not to take this into account in our context is to neglect the most important fact of all. Yet the supernatural dimension has not only been forgotten, it has been ruled out of court by many. Lewis observes: “The Naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one’s own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and therefore something other than Nature exists.”[note]C.S. Lewis, Miracles (Touchstone, 1996), p 23.[/note]
Not only does science fail to rule out the supernatural—the very doing of science or any other rational activity rules it in. The Bible gives us a reason for trusting reason. Atheism does not. This is the exact opposite of what many people think.
This article is an extract from “Can Science Explain Everything?” by John C Lennox, published by The Good Book Company, January 2019
The book is available at a special discount price of £5.00. Enter the following code at the checkout: “SolasLennox”. Click here to use the discount code.
is Professor of Mathematics (emeritus) at the University of Oxford and Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, Oxford. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School, Oxford University, and teaches for the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme. In addition, he is an Adjunct Lecturer at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University, and at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, as well as being a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum.
In Aberdeen the Christian Union organised a public dialogue between me and a lovely sceptical academic. Professor William Naphy billed himself as a sceptic rather than an atheist, and we asked to address the subject: “What does the good society look like, and how do we get there?” It was an amazing event actually. The CU had organised it to promote their mission week, and get some momentum behind that and they were hugely encouraged by the large turnout on the night. Professor Naphy noted that it was the largest audience he had seen at a student society meeting.
I was initially a bit nervous because Professor Naphy is a historian whose specialisms are sex, gender, witchcraft and Calvinism! He spoke first, and his presentation was really interesting. His premise was that religion has caused damage and his particular example was Calvin’s Geneva, which was quite brutal to opponents of Calvinism. Then I got up and argued that to create a good society we need to make good people; which gets right to the heart of the gospel – because we are not inherently good people; we need something that can transform the human heart. So I gently segued into a gospel presentation, by showing that when utopian ideas for a good society have been tried (based on politics or science) they have always failed.
I used a quotation about the wonders of technology and the way in which it will open up a future of peace on earth and universal harmony. Then I revealed that it was written in 1915 by Nikolai Tesla! I spoke about the difference the gospel makes; but I landed on a piece by Matthew Parris from the Times. entitled, “Why as an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God“.
The Q&A was amazing. I had basically agreed with Professor Naphy that when religion gets into power it is always bad. However, I went on to explain that Christianity is not about changing society by grabbing the leavers of power from above, but about transforming us from below. Christians are called to be “salt and light”, not to wield the instruments of the state to try and bring about some utopian ideal and every time that has tried it has gone wrong. So when I mapped out that position, Professor Naphy just sort of melted! He basically agreed with me, and even quoted the Bible, about Jesus and the Pharisees! The Pharisees were a powerful ultra-religious sect, who were confronted by Jesus. I was amazed, because the hostility I was anticipating was entirely absent! It’s a shame he had to dash away afterwards because I’d loved to have spent some more time with him.
Professor Naphy saw these issues through an academic lens. He argued from the perspective of a historian who had seen the damage the church has done when it has tried to manipulate society to enact the vision of some strange kind of theocracy. Understandably he recoiled from it.
I have encountered this objection before. Usually however, it doesn’t come from someone looking objectively at wider history, but from people who have had a bad experience of church personally. I often say, “Yes the church has at times gone very badly wrong”. However if we can strip away the baggage and see what Jesus really intended, there is something deeply attractive about him. That’s the central theme of the film that CPX in Australia have made about the church through history, which is so helpful.
Sarah McLean, the CU’s Relay Worker for Aberdeen commented, “The dialogue went very well and the discussion from both Andy and Naphy was very gracious and interesting. There was over 100 people there and I think we reached a group of students that we wouldn’t normally see at events. The response from those there was really positive. It seemed to spark interest and questions in folks that will hopefully lead to them returning to events week talks that interest them.”
In the preface to this short and accessible book, Pete Williams, warden of Tyndale House in Cambridge, states that his aim is to “present a case for the reliability of the Gospels to those who are thinking about the subject for the first time”. Has he managed to do so? It would be a very short review simply to answer in the affirmative, but I want to do exactly that before saying a little more. I want to commend Williams’ book and persuade you of its worth. Then I want to suggest who might be most helped by it.
The book proceeds through a number of arguments for the reliability of the Gospels, many of which will be familiar to anyone who has dipped their toe in these waters. The added value in this book is threefold. First, the issues are explained with a commendable clarity and simplicity. Secondly, it is obvious to any reader that there is a weight of scholarship behind every sentence in the book. Footnotes are kept to a minimum, but there are enough to give the reader confidence that Williams’ arguments are based on careful (and lifelong) engagement with these issues at an academic level. Thirdly, there are a number of lines of evidence adduced in this book that will be new to many readers and reflect some more recent scholarly findings. For example, Williams draws upon Bauckham’s work on the Gospels as eyewitness testimony and develops it further with his own work on naming conventions in 1st century Palestine and accuracy of geographical knowledge. For many, therefore, the chapter “Did the Gospel writers know their stuff?” is on its own worth the cost of the book, containing much fascinating information and pointers towards further reading for those particularly interested.
The cumulative case presented is compelling. Williams is careful to point out that he is not trying to “prove” the trustworthiness of the Gospels so much as trying to show that it is entirely rational to trust them as reliable accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching. In this aim, I would certainly judge him successful. However, this leads to a last reflection on Williams’ book. Who will benefit from it?
Is this the sort of book that could be given to an interested sceptic? Certainly – although I don’t meet many interested sceptics who are asking the particular questions being answered by this book. Does that mean that it’s not a useful book? Far from it! It’s just that we need to be clear that a book like this isn’t designed to compel someone into the Kingdom by sheer force of logic and weight of evidence – Williams is careful to avoid such a modernist construal of faith. Rather, I suspect that this book is going to be most helpful in giving confidence to young Christians. It is essential reading for Christians who have (or are faced with) questions about the reliability and authority of the Gospels and need to know that their questions or doubts can be answered so that they can engage in conversation with their non-believing friends without the fear that somehow their faith will be shown to be in vain. It would be an excellent resource for, for example, undergraduate theology students.
In conclusion, then, this is a great little book and should form part of an armoury of resources that will give Christians greater confidence in the reasonableness of their faith. If it then causes those Christians both to live in line with the Gospels and to share more confidently and winsomely the Good News of their subject, then the job will be well done.
Can we trust the Gospels? by Peter J Williams, Crossway, 2018.
ISBN 9781433552953 £8.99 . Purchase here.
Reviewed by Dr Mark Stirling. Mark is the Director of The Chalmers Institute in St Andrews. The Chalmers Institute exists for the renewal of Church leadership in Europe by developing Biblically mature leaders who will equip God’s people for lives of discipleship and evangelism.
Andy Bannister writes:
From Edmonton I went a few hundred miles southwards to Calgary, where the university mission was also really well attended. At the first lunch bar on the Wednesday (which was about the resurrection of Jesus), there was standing room only, we must have had 200 hundred students in the room. They asked really great questions too! It was great to see people really taking the gospel seriously and thinking about what was being shared.
Then I did another dialogue with a Muslim scholar, and again there were dozens of Muslims as part of the audience. And the same subjects came up as at Edmonton: sin and salvation. One of the most poignant moments for me was when the Muslim Imam I was engaging with actually said, “In Islam there is no salvation: there is no salvation in Islam. You are responsible for your own sin, and responsible for working your way out of it, there is no salvation”. What a profound contrast with Christianity: in Islam and Christianity, we really do have two very different gods—one who leaves us to get on with it, and the other who says, “No, you need my help, and I will help you.” So again this topic of sin, how bad it is, what God’s solution to it is and what God’s solution isn’t; is at the heart of the difference between Christianity and Islam.
On the last night of the mission I spoke on the subject, “Why Did Jesus Die For Me?” It’s a hugely important topic, because as Christians we talk about the cross, we talk about salvation; but the question people often have is, “Why did Jesus have die for me?”
In the talk, I took on two objections. The first is the response by some people: ‘I don’t need a saviour thank you very much, I’m a good person.’ So we addressed that challenge. Then I addressed a second question, ‘Why did Jesus have to die for me? Why couldn’t God just forgive me?’ I explained that forgiveness is always costly; there’s no such thing as free forgiveness. There’s always a price to forgiveness. If you damage someone else’s car, and you can’t afford to pay, you’re not insured, but the other driver whose car you damaged forgives you and let’s you off the debt, well that forgiveness isn’t free, it has cost them money! Or if someone hurts you personally, someone stabs you in the back, betrays you, insults you, and then later asks for your forgiveness, and you forgive them—well, there is a cost to that forgiveness. You have to carry the cost of that forgiveness within yourself without reminding them of the hurt that they have done to you. Therefore it should come as no surprise that given how badly we have wronged God, that God’s forgiveness wasn’t free but cost God a great deal. Of course the rest of the story is that His love is so great for us that He was willing to do it.
It was great to see responses during the mission—some people giving their lives to Christ for the first time and about 40 people signed up for the Alpha Course. Alpha is a ten week programme which lets people explore the Christian faith and the claims of Jesus at their own speed.
Solas: You’re coming to Scotland soon, speaking on behalf of an organisation called “LivingOut”. So, who are LivingOut, and what’s your role?
ES: I’m one of the co-founders of Living Out, with Sam Allberry and Sean Doherty. We started it together back in 2013. It came out of a group of same-sex attracted church leaders who realised that our alternative stories of living with same-sex attraction under the lordship of Christ weren’t being told. We wanted to get our stories out there, so our website was launched. We then discovered that there was a need to equip churches, and train church leaders, so our leadership training “LOCAL Course” was developed. Various other things like books being written and published, short films being shot, us becoming a charity, all happened too. I now serve as our chair of trustees and travel and speak on behalf of Living Out around the UK (and elsewhere). This includes leading “LOCAL Course” leaders training courses all over the place, and speaking at other events too. Last summer included appearing alongside Solas’ Andy Banister at Creationfest; the trendiest Christian festival ever. It was all hipsters and surf-dudes in Cornwall. I felt very lost!!
Solas: All put together, that’s quite a workload!
ES: The other thing is that as well as Living Out, we are all involved in local churches and other ministry! So we are all addressing these issues not just from the perspective of people experiencing same-sex attraction; but also from experience of local church leadership. We’re all engaged, not just in the theology, and ethics of this, but also about caring for people better and teaching on this subject in a local context too. I am a pastor – I do this in my free time!
Solas: That must be quite a juggling act to sustain. Our mutual friend David Robertson spent a long time as full-time pastor and running Solas as well – doing three men’s work! Pastoral ministry can be all-consuming; both in terms of time and brain-space! How do you keep going? What’s your heart-motivation?
ES: I think that when it comes to the controversy surrounding sexuality, gender and identity, God is being good to us by making us think hard about these issues at the moment. We have lost contact with a lot of what the Bible teaches about each of those areas; and all the culture changes are making us really think and re-articulate biblical truths which we have rather ignored and not particularly lived out. So, I’m really stirred by the thought that this is a chance for a bit of a Reformation – a returning to The Bible in an area in which we haven’t been thinking biblically for a while; ideas of gender, sexuality and identity in particular.
Solas: Is that symptomatic of a wider biblical-illiteracy, and disconnection from what God wants us to do, in the church in this country?
ES: Well, yes – and also suggests a form of idolatry towards marriage and family that’s blinded us to the fact that lots of people live their lives as single people, and that some people are same-sex attracted and that not everybody gets married and settles down with 2.4 children. However, we are encouraged by the number of people who recognise that the church could do better. There are nightmare stories which the media often tell us, but our experience is that there are lots of positive stories, but that most churches also recognise that they have a lot to learn.
Solas: So, how did you end up in the work you are now involved in?
ES: Well, with both pastoral ministry and LivingOut, I was dragged kicking and screaming into them!! My Grandfather and father were both Vicars! And the very last thing I was going to do was work for a church! And the other LAST thing I was going to do was talk to people about my sexuality! So I am doing the two last things I thought I would do, which is God’s sense of humour – and a good challenge for me. I never say I’m never going to do anything now, because the things I’ve said I will never do are things I’ve ended up doing. On the calling to pastor a church it came from a lot of people telling me that this is what I ought to be doing; God calling through his people. On the LivingOut side of things it was just a strong sense that something needed to be said and done that wasn’t being said or done. So I felt I should step up, and speak out because the need was great – and I was able to speak into the situation.
Solas: And where is LivingOut at as an organisation at the moment, is it growing, are you reaching more people?
ES: Well we’re up to well over 1,000 church leaders who have done our leaders training (LOCAL Course) both here and in the USA. We keep doing them and people keep coming. We are encouraged by that and want to see those numbers continue to grow. We’re also wanting to improve the resources available on the website both for Christians who experience same-sex attraction like myself; and also for other church leaders. So we’ve got plans to make sure that the website is increasingly the place that church pastors go to when they’ve got questions surrounding issues of gender, sexuality and identity.
Solas: And do you ever get any hostility to your work?
ES: Sadly, the people who are most offensive are other Christians, usually in the United States who think that we are “liberal”. We don’t get much grief from secular campaigners. Sadly it is usually from Christians.
Solas: Around terminology issues again?
ES: Around terminology, yes – and around pushing back on the fact that we are not investing in some of the methods and thinking of the past in terms of reparative therapy; or thinking that to be godly you have to be heterosexual; and that healing, in the here and now, must mean getting married and having 2.4 children. But overt hostility actually comes from very few people, really.
Solas: Are you encouraged in your work?
ES: Yes, and what I am most encouraged by is that in most big evangelical churches (which we are always told are horrible places for LGBT people to be), there are Christians who are same-sex attracted who are living for Jesus. I’ve been really encouraged to find that to be a reality, in evangelical churches all over the UK. It’s really important to also understand that there are people becoming Christians from the LGBT community, today. Now, some people think that that is an impossibility, but it is happening across the UK, and that is actually what encourages me most. What’s more, God is using same-sex attracted people to make the church increasingly friendly to all kinds of single people.
Solas: You’ve mentioned “The LOCAL Course”, a few times, tell us more about what that’s about?
ES: So our LOCAL Course is a one-day course, suitable for church leaders, leadership teams including para-church organisations, helping them to see how they can become ‘biblically inclusive’ of sexual minority groups. With language here we have to be careful because you win some people and antagonise others with it. We want to stress and re-embrace the inclusive language, but define it in a biblical way. And the aim of the course is to help churches to be inclusive of LGBT people in that biblical way, a distinctively Christian way. This course is designed to help churches and church leaders to see how they could be educated and equipped to do better.
Solas: And do you lead the course yourself, or is there a team of people?
ES: It sounds pretentious to say, but I’ll be leading a team of people from LivingOut. We all speak from our own experience of same-sex Attraction so, we all address these issues with some knowledge and empathy. We use a mixture of interviews, videos, talks and Q&A. The great thing about Q&A is that people come with whatever is on their minds. We have questions which range from, “should Christians go to gay-weddings?” to, “What does LGBT stand for?” to, “What do we say to a gay couple who have become Christians?”; questions around transgender, basically every imaginable question comes up! On the day, the first session is on ‘Understanding the Culture’, (what’s changed and why it’s changed). The second is on “How do we better communicate what the Bible teaches, in a way that that culture will understand – and connect with?” The third session is “How can our churches be more welcoming, and pastorally sensitive to people from an LGBT background?”. Then it’s on to the Q&A, inevitably – which every Christian conference needs!!
Solas: I assume that at an event like this you mostly face reasonably friendly questions, will it attract people who won’t agree with you too?
ES: Well, one of the things we do is, we ask people who are coming to sign up to the Evangelical Alliance’s Affirmations on Human Sexuality. That’s not because we don’t like debating the morality of the issues with people who disagree with us, we do that in plenty of other contexts. However, the “LOCALCourse” is specifically focused on training up people to be biblically inclusive within the traditional biblical understanding of sex and marriage. So we ask people to signup to those affirmations, so that we are all working together from the same biblical viewpoint. We are not anti-debate, but this particular event is focused on those who are coming the same perspective.
Solas: And you do this course all over the place?
ES: Edinburgh is in the diary, and dates keep being added. We are taking a break in the summer till the autumn, then we’re heading way down south to Southampton. Basically filling in the gaps in the UK. In the last year we’ve done Cardiff and Belfast, so Edinburgh was the obvious next one. So to begin to reach Scotland we paid Edinburgh the compliment of going there first.
SOLAS: Just to upset the Glaswegians!
ES: That, exactly! And my sister and brother-in-law live in Edinburgh too, so I’m very happy to go there!
SOLAS: Thanks for your time, Ed. It’s been great to speak to you; and all the best for Edinburgh!
ES: Thanks for the opportunity to talk about the work, Solas!
“The issue of sexuality is unavoidable in contemporary Britain. Specifically, the issues around same sex attraction need to be handled with a combination of warm sensitivity anchored to clear biblical values. The LOCAL course provides skills, wisdom and insight for leaders as they try to care for their congregations and communities. I thoroughly recommend it as a much needed resource for local churches and Christian agencies.”
-Stephen Gaukroger, Director, Clarion Trust International
I worked for six years in Canada before I came to Scotland, and was back there recently to do two university missions in the ‘frozen North’! If you think it’s cold here in the UK, try going to Canada and experiencing -30’!
I started my time in Canada at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, at a big student mission week. It was great to see the students really engaged, the lunch-bars full; and people coming to Christ – all the things we get really excited about.
My first talk was on “Jesus and the Failures of the Church”. Many people are disillusioned with the Christian faith because of bad experiences with the Church. That’s either at a personal level, or when the Church has tried to seize power and change society from the top-down, and made a mess of things. This, of course, is in contrast to the message of Jesus, which is still hugely attractive today. My talk drew heavily on the CPX film from Australia, For the Love of God. That documentary takes a very honest look at both the successes and failures of the church through history; and doesn’t shy away from the times the Church has betrayed Christ. However, there have also been some critical moments in history when the Church has reflected something of the beauty of Christ. The point is that Jesus is the measure of everything, and that he offers forgiveness and salvation when we fail to live up to his standards.
The highlights from Edmonton were the two public-dialogue events that I increasingly specialise in. On the first night of the mission I did one with Imam Sherif Ayoup a very well-known local Muslim leader. It was a ‘moderated-dialogue’, so the moderator put questions to both of us and the result was a conversation that really brought out the huge differences between Christianity and Islam, not least, on the issue of “sin and salvation”. In Islam, sin is quite a mild thing: God gives you commandments, and if you break them, you keep a few more to balance the equation. It’s basically an economic relationship. However, in Christianity we understand that sin is a fundamental rupture in our relationship with God which is so drastic that we can’t fix ourselves and thus we need a saviour. That profound difference between Islam and Christianity came out time and time again in the dialogue. It was really, really exciting to be able to share Christ with the many Muslims who came along.
Nathan Betts said, “Andy’s dialogue with an Imam was the highlight of the week for me. The audience that evening was engaged from beginning to end. When each speaker spoke, there was pin drop silence. The beauty and credibility of the Christian faith shone through Andy’s presentation that evening, and in his interaction with the Imam.”
I also had a dialogue with Karen Lumley Kerr, the head of the local humanist association, around the question, “Do human rights make sense without God?” She tried to answer, “yes they do because…..” and drew on our shared evolutionary history. In other words because we all have a shared genetic history, and have DNA in common, we should therefore respect one another. That is a lovely idea but doesn’t really work. After all, I share carbon atoms with a table and I share some genetic history with lettuces, but that doesn’t really mean that I owe lettuces or tables anything! I think we need something deeper than shared genetic heritage on which to ground human rights and dignity.
Interestingly, the language the Universal Declaration of Human Rights uses, speaking of ‘human rights, dignity and value’, is profoundly Christian. So I developed the idea that it’s only the Christian story, which says that we are ‘made in the image of God’, which genuinely confers value on human beings; irrespective of race, gender, ability or so forth. The other thing I brought out in the dialogue is that it isn’t just a question of human rights and dignity, there’s also the question of accounting for the way human beings repeatedly go wrong. Again, if you try and ground your ethics in evolution, the problem is that evolution has thrown up wildly violent behaviour as well as wildly compassionate behaviour. So how do we determine between them? From a Christian perspective, the gospel doesn’t just give us value (in that we are made in the image of God and Christ died for us); it also addresses our brokenness, which is what causes us to flout the rights and dignity of one another in the first place.
All in all, we had a fascinating dialogue. Karen was very friendly, we had a really good evening, and then what was great was that a load of folks from the atheist community came down to the pub with us afterwards where we shared Christ with them until midnight. It was great to engage with some really good questions and see a real openness amongst them.
SOLAS: Everyone has heard that you are leaving Scotland, but no-one knows much about what you are going to be doing! What are you are planning next?
DAVID: I’m moving to Australia! I’m going to be working with an organisation called the City Bible Forum. They are excellent at doing outreach in the cities, businessmen’s lunches, events for lawyers and things like that. I’m going to help develop something called “3rd Space”. That means, if you view the Church as one space, and the culture as another space, “3rd Space” is the kind of thing Solas does here, with cafe evangelism. So my main task will be to do evangelism and help facilitate churches doing evangelism.
SOLAS: So is this work a new start-up?
DAVID: Well City Bible Forum itself is well established, but the bit I’m going to be doing is a new idea. They felt they were doing well in certain areas, but when I was over there on sabbatical last year and did some work for them, they really felt that they could use more of what I was doing. For me, the “3rd Space”, is really where I fit in.
SOLAS: So what will your daily work-life look like when you get there?
DAVID: Well, according to some of my friends, it will be on Bondi Beach! Actually, I don’t know what it will be like. I will be part of a team with guys like Steve McAlpine in Perth, and Sam Chan. It’s really important that I’m working as part of a team. I’ll be Sydney based, but covering the other cities as well, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide. Steve will cover Perth, but it’s as far from Sydney to Perth as it is from Dundee to Moscow! I will be directly involved in evangelism, but my new role will also involve preaching, writing, and training people as well.
SOLAS: So are you moving Down Under for good?
DAVID: No, its a two-year commitment, because it’s a two-year visa. So, yes, two years. The unique thing I do though, is cultural engagement – and that’s what we really need to try and develop. That’s the plan, but who knows!
SOLAS: I remember when you arrived in Dundee. I was a member of the University Christian Union, and you came to speak at our lunch at Pete’s Bar in the Union, billed as the ‘new guy!’
DAVID: Yes, and that was a looooonnng time ago, 27 years!
SOLAS: So, you have two years planned ahead of you in Australia. What are your goals, what’s your vision, what do you hope to achieve? Two-years is quite a narrow time-space?
DAVID: Yes, it’s a very narrow time-space! My view is that if you are coming to work in a local church here in Scotland it takes you five years just to get settled in. We were here 18 years before we began to see any significant fruit. So, it’s a very, very different thing. We still don’t have our visas yet, we’re still waiting for those. My aim is provoke, to stimulate, and God-willing we’ll hit the ground running.
SOLAS: Provoke? You!!!?? Surely not!!
DAVID: No, not me!! I feel that I don’t think I’ve been provocative enough! The phrase in Hebrews 10 though is to ‘provoke one another to love and good works’.
Australia though isn’t as far down the road as we are. I used to think that it was more secular than us, but is in fact considerably less secular. I think that in Australia they can turn back the tide, and I think that it is evangelism that is needed to do that. Especially evangelism that is culturally engaged, not stuck in the Christian cultural ghetto, hence the “3rd Space” idea. I think the situation in Scotland is a good bit different. I would like to come back, love to come back to Scotland, the UK and Europe, but this just seems like the right thing to do at this moment in time.
SOLAS: How does the Australian church scene differ from Scotland?
DAVID: It’s very different! So there are some similarities, but Sydney in particular is different. The older denominations are much more evangelical there. I was speaking to the Anglican Bishop of Wollongong, he has sixty churches in his diocese and every single one of them is Evangelical/Reformed. There are probably only five congregations on the whole of the Scottish Episcopal Church that would describe themselves in those terms. In Australia they have Hillsong on the Charismatic side, and other large churches like that. There’s a growing F.I.E.C. movement, there are the Sydney Anglicans. There are also a lot of Chinese people there, and I have previously really enjoyed working with the Chinese Presbyterians. My aim is to work with all of them. Whether that will work, and whether they’ll want me to, I don’t know! The whole thing is that this is a huge “gamble”. It may not work at all, on the other hand it may take off! Who knows?
SOLAS: And City Bible Forum works across the denominations?
DAVID: Yes, it’s an interdenominational thing. They’ve done a lot of big events in the past, but they have also organised smaller ones too and I’m wanting to move it beyond the event-type thing.
SOLAS: And is there a sister-church to the Free Church of Scotland that you have natural, existing ties to?
DAVID: Well, there’s the Presbyterian Church of Australia, which used to be closely tied to the Church of Scotland, but because of the Church of Scotland’s direction over recent years on issues like same-sex marriage, they have loosened their ties. They are now closer to the Free Church of Scotland.
There is also the Presbyterian Church of Eastern Australia which is a more traditional Free Church. Since the Free Church of Scotland has started singing hymns and so forth, I don’t think they are speaking to us! (I’m joking!) I have actually written for both of those denomination’s magazines, and I would hope to work with them.
On previous visits we have been very involved with St Thomas’s Anglican in Sydney, so we hope to work with them again. However, we’ve also been asked to help with a new church plant, in a hippie-ish student area, which I’m really tempted by. Then the Presbyterian Church has a church revitalisation project, right in the heart of Sydney, which I would want to help with. I think that because my remit will be to encourage evangelism through all sorts of local churches, I won’t be tied just to one church.
SOLAS: And many opportunities for student work?
DAVID: Oh yes! So many opportunities. When I was there before I did some work in the “Eton and Harrow” of Australia, which was fantastic! How many opportunities? Well, how long is a piece of string!? The opportunities for evangelism are tremendous, and that’s what I want to do.
SOLAS: And is there an equivalent of UCCF/IFES?
DAVID: Yes, Australian IFES is very active and I’ve been involved with the folks there already. They do lots of university missions, debates and all those sorts of things.
One of the things about the Australians is that they are not subtle, are they?! And I like that! An Australian pastor said to me, “you’re really unusual for a Brit, you really ‘get’ us!” I said, “I’m just who I am, you’re probably more like me than most Brits!” They are very direct!
In Australia you also have the Indigenous population, many of whom are Christians, which is really fascinating for me. Then you have the white Europeans, and many of them are moving towards a more secular world-view, like we have in Europe; and that is doing a great deal of harm. But Australia is very rapidly becoming much more Asian and churches are growing rapidly — especially amongst the Chinese; but also amongst Vietnamese and Indonesian people as well. My argument would be that from Scotland you can reach Europe; but from Australia you can reach Asia. Maybe that’s where the future of the Church is, I don’t know. But if I could be even a little, tiny part of that, I would be happy to be so.
SOLAS: In terms of the white European population. We know what the challenges to the gospel are here; is it similar for them? What are the objections that an average Sydney person will have to the gospel that you will have to address in your preaching? What are the key apologetic tasks?
DAVID: Well, pretty much the same as here, really. There is a good deal of indifference and apathy, and then there is very militant secularism in the academic institutions. I look forward to that challenge — if they’ve got the nerve! You know, as they say, “Come on, if you think you’re hard enough!”. We will face the same materialism as we do here, but we will also observe the same failings of secularism that I do in Scotland. The intolerance, the political-correctness, the greed and political corruption; all these kind of things. But all these things present an opportunity as well as a challenge for the gospel.
SOLAS: And what are the top three things you are going to miss about Dundee?
DAVID: Alright! Number one is St Peter’s Church. This place has been transformed over the years, it is very much my spiritual home, these people are my spiritual family. This was way and above the hardest part about this decision to go. In terms of physical family, I have family here, and in Australia; so that was ‘six of one, half a dozen of the other’, but leaving St Peter’s is really, really hard.
Then, I really, really like the people of Dundee. Even though I think the way that this city is run is as bad as they way our country is run. People have said to me, “You’re running away from Brexit”. No, I’d love to be here for Brexit (if it ever happens). But I am much more concerned about the fact that Scotland seems to be moving towards a much more authoritarian, intolerant, anti-Christian point of view. I would still like to be here to fight that battle, but probably need a break for a while, because I’m knackered!
SOLAS: There are a lot of people who are your supporters and friends, all over Scotland. What they want to know is, what you would like them to pray for as you head off to this new work?
DAVID: Well, basically I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing, which is my way of operating! My modus operandi is to do things without really knowing what I’m doing. It’s a high-risk/high-reward strategy, but there’s also high failure risk too! So this could all be a disaster.
So in terms of prayer. Pray first of all that we get the visas! And pray about my health, because my health has always been mixed since 2011. Last year was a good year for me, because I wasn’t in hospital at all! I will be having another operation before I go to Australia. So please pray for the visa, for my health. Also I think that pray for the work, that God would give clear guidance as to what we should do. I don’t want to waste my time. I mean, to give up St Peter’s is to give up a lot for me. And also pray that in the Lord’s providence that I would be able to come back. And I don’t want to come back and retire and lead a quiet life.
They used to say that in your fifties you were at your peak in the ministry, because you have all that experience, but you still have energy! But Os Guinness said to me that now that’s your 60s! So I’m still three years off my sixties, so if God spares me I’ve got a lot more to give and I’d like to give it in as profitable and fruitful way as possible. And obviously I will continue to pray that the work of Solas continues to grow and develop.
It’s funny though, because since news about my plans has gone out, I’ve had some politicians contact me to say, “Good Riddance!”. While others have contacted me to say, “What are we going to do without you!” The very mixed reactions have been quite interesting. Both responses are quite humbling, actually.
SOLAS: And I see that you will be living very close to where “The Ashes” will be played in 2020-1!
DAVID: Well, that’s got to be booked in! Oh my goodness, I’d love that!
I love Dundee, I do. But as a city, Sydney is my favourite city in the world by a mile. I love New York as well. Annabel and myself are really city people. But Sydney – the opportunities for ministry are just amazing, Now I am aware of the ‘grass is greener’ syndrome, and that when I was there before I was the new-boy on the block, so everyone loves you. (Everyone loves you when you are new or dying!) But the environment and the opportunities for gospel ministry are amazing. Lat time God opened so many doors, in such a short space of time, it was remarkable. The were the kind of doors that here, you have to work long and hard to get through. And I have worked long and hard, but I think it is time for something different.
SOLAS: Well we’ll be praying for you, and for St Peter’s as it enters a new phase in its life.
DAVID: Well, I should also say that if I had stayed here it would have been very difficult to have stayed as the minister of St Peter’s and do all the other things I do in wider ministry. As a congregation it has grown from a handful of people to some 300 plus, and it requires a full-time minister, and I can’t be that, not with the stuff I do. And I can’t not-do what I do. I feel a calling to be pastor of this congregation, but also a calling to reach out, engage secular media, do evangelism. It was going to be one or the other, and the result of all that wrestling is that it is going to be the other. I wish it could have been in Scotland, but right now it can’t, but maybe in the future it will be.
SOLAS: Well, we’ll pray and see what happens!
DAVID: Thanks!
“
LESS < Lies
LESS < Fake
LESS < Doubt
MORE > Truth
Truth is a tricky thing. Today, ‘the truth’ is not just hard to swallow; it is something we refuse to swallow. Truth is too certain, too divisive, too arrogant. In response, today’s truth is often one of relativism: what’s true for you might not be true for me. But if it’s sometimes true, and sometimes not, is it really truth at all?
Jesus claimed to be ‘the way and the truth and the life.’ But can we really accept this ultimate truth in an age of questioning, uncertainty, relativism and scepticism? In MORE > Truth, young philosopher Kristi Mair explores whether Christians can be confident in the ‘truth’ in our anything goes age.
Read a review by Liz Willis here
Available at 10ofThose.com
Author Kristi Mair currently works as Pastoral Support and Research Fellow at Oak Hill College, whilst studying for her PhD at University of Birmingham. Kristi is also an apologist and evangelist who speaks regularly at evangelistic events. While pursuing her academic career, she has worked with Friends International and the UCCF as their Assistant Team Leader for the Midlands.
