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Published in Christian Today   21st June 2016

 Isn’t it great to be free! Especially free to be creative. Doesn’t religion shackle creativity? Isn’t it just better to be ourselves and express ourselves? So runs the somewhat narrow and simplistic narrative of some of our culture. Does Christianity really stifle music and the arts? I guess tales of bagpipes being burned (although that may have had something to do with taste rather than theology!), or statues being smashed can fuel that misapprehension. Because, as anyone who knows anything about art or music history, it is a demonstrably false claim.
I once visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was astounded at the crowds in the 17th, 18th and 19th century galleries. Then I went into the 20th century gallery – there was enough space to play five-a-side football! Why? It’s a complex question but I think one aspect is that largely 20th century art has lost its way, becoming a commercialised caricature of itself (and I say this as someone who likes a great deal of modern art and supports modern art galleries). When someone asks “what is art worth?” and the answer is given, “what any idiot is prepared to pay for it?” then you have reached a level of anti-art which is the real stifler of creativity. Paying £5 million for someone’s bed, or £250,00 for a pair of spectacles left in the middle of the floor, or any other expensive surrealist joke is sadly all too common.
I visited a small Edinburgh art gallery to have a look at the work of an artist I know whose painting is very special. One of his works of art was hanging at a price of around £5,000. It was a beautiful creation that stunned me and filled me with awe (ever notice how really good art inspires worship?) Beside it was a painting which was selling for around £40,000… to say it was rubbish would be to be unkind to garbage. I asked the gallery director why the difference in price and which painting he thought was the better. His answer was revealing. The cheaper painting was by far the best, but the other one was more expensive because of the name on it. Without the name you would have done well to sell it for £10 in a bring ‘n’ buy. With the name it cost £40,000. No-one was going to buy it for the beauty, the quality or the art. Dealers would buy it as an ‘investment’ – hoping that because it cost so much, people would value it!
My church is just up from one of the best art schools in the country, the Duncan of Jordanston College of Art and Design at Dundee University. I love going to their degree shows, though it can be depressing that there are still young artists who think they are being radical by featuring genitalia in their art! One year there was a young jeweller who produced a fabulously intricate, well-designed and beautiful piece of jewellery. She got a 2:2. Then there was another who produced a rotting carrot on chain. They got a First! Much to the embarrassment of the college, the 2:2 went on to become British young jeweller of the year and now makes her living in her chosen craft. I don’t know if the First made it, but I suspect their career was more likely to be in gardening!
Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture traces some of the developments in this. It is a classic which examines the relationship between philosophy, worldview, history and art. That’s why it is this week’s highly recommended book of the week.
The fact is that Christianity has always encouraged art. Jesus is supreme patron of the arts. And why not? After all, if we believe that he is God and God is Creator and we are created in his image, then surely that enhances rather than restricts creativity? We are creative because we have been created by the Creator. I used to give a lecture in art colleges entitled ‘Can Artists be Atheists?’ The title really upset some people because they thought I was asking could atheists be artists? – which of course they can! It might appear that the original question has an obvious answer, too. But my point is that it is more difficult for artists to be atheists and to be consistent. How can you have art without the Artist? How can you have creativity without the Creator?
Christianity has always been associated with music as well. Our God is a God who sings. “He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17) There have been many musicians who believe that their music was a gift from God. I remember one atheist saying that the best argument for God he had ever heard was JS Bach. The late great Johnny Cash expressed it well:

“And that was the first time I remember her calling my voice ‘the gift’. Thereafter she always used that term when she talked about my music, and I think she did so on purpose, to remind me that the music in me was something special given by God. My job was to care for it and use it well; I was its bearer, not its owner.”

I am certainly not saying that the best musicians or songwriters are always Christians, far from it. I recall a wonderful scene in a Christian gathering where a young Scot stood up and sang a dreadful song in an American Country and Western accent. It really was cringeworthy – especially when he introduced his self-penned composition with the words: “the Lord gave me this song”. The leader of that particular event, with all the subtlety of my fellow Scots, stood up, walked over, took the sheet of paper from the music stand and with the words of Job, “the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord!”, scrunched it up and threw it in the bin.
I am saying, however, that the gift of music is one of the great gifts of God. Calvin taught that of all the gifts God gives us, it is the most powerful. And the great themes of the Bible; creation, humanity, sin, redemption, love, life, death, beauty, ugliness and hope, are the themes out of which the best music arises. I think of a band I absolutely love, The Manic Street Preachers. I love the way they explore these great themes through their music. Although at one level they come across as anti-religious, I think their analysis of the human situation is often spot on, and the questions they ask are all answered in Christ. Richey James, their initial lead singer who sadly disappeared in 2002 (presumed dead), wrote: “I never saw the point of organised religion.” In his desperate search for meaning he tried drugs, alcohol and self-mutilation. He described an idyllic childhood and a rotten adult life. He became obsessed with religion and the basic questions of humanity; latterly carrying a book of biblical quotes everywhere. Their album, The Holy Bible is an album, unlike the real Bible, full of pain, and without any real hope.
The great Dutch Calvinist Abraham Kuyper declared:

“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!'”

That includes art and music. That is why for some of us the notion of Christian music, and Christian art, makes about as much sense as that of Christian sausages or Christian bricks. Music and art are tools given to us by the Creator, to be used for his glory or to be perverted by his Enemy. Christ does not stifle the arts, he frees them. Music is not drowned out by the pious; it is Jesus who puts the song into our hearts.

Published in Christian Today   01 June 2016

The word ‘freedom’ is one of the great buzzwords of our culture. In the words of the rock band Queen, we all want to “break free”. Whether it’s Mel Gibson shouting “Freedom” as he is hung, drawn and quartered, or Martin Luther King crying “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last”, we all want freedom.
But as Rousseau famously observed: “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”. What chains our freedom? Economics, certainly. After all I may be theoretically free to visit Australia, or live in central London, but if I don’t have the money to do so, that ‘freedom’ is worthless. Politics also. There are many countries in the world where freedom of action, thought and religion are greatly restricted. Physical limitation, of course, inhibits freedom. I might believe I can fly, but if I were to jump out of a 20 story skyscraper I would soon be brought down to earth! Mental capacity is also a restriction – much as I would love to discuss nuclear physics and Tolstoy in Serbo-Croatian, Chinese and Russian, I am unlikely to be able to do so.
But there is one restriction on human freedom that is being dealt with today in the Western world – the debilitating and corrosive effect of religion. The narrative is that for far too long religion has held the world in its chains but at last humankind is beginning to move away from our enslavement to man-made gods, and walking into the freedom of the Enlightenment. At least in the West, that is. Other parts of the world are still backward and ‘less-developed’, but as is evidenced by the rise of atheism in the US and the decline of the Church in the UK, the dream of Rousseau, Voltaire, Nietzsche and Russell is at least beginning to come true. Soon we will be free of religion and all its restrictions on sexual, emotional, personal and societal freedom. Or so the utopian dreams of the atheistic secularists go. But is it true?

Does religion restrict freedom?

Christopher Hitchens certainly thought so – “The urge to ban and censor books, silence dissenters, condemn outsiders, invade the private sphere, and invoke an exclusive salvation is the very essence of totalitarianism”.  We have to agree that often religion does restrict freedom. But again we come back to tarring everyone with the same brush. It is clearly demonstrable that anti-religion can also restrict freedom. By definition there has to be some kind of restriction. Would you really want to live in a society where everything could be published? The minute you state that the dissemination of child pornography should be illegal you have breached the principle of absolute freedom of speech. Every society is going to offer some kind of restriction; the only question is where you draw the line.
As a historian and student of politics I would argue that societies that have been based upon biblical principles tend to offer a far greater freedom than those that have replaced God with the State. Have any totalitarian states in the modern world been Christian? I am struggling to think of any that could seriously be called such. It’s not difficult to think of atheistic or other religious states that fit the bill.
While Hitler may not have been a card-carrying atheist (the jury is still out on that one), Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot definitely were. Stalin is particularly interesting. As a teenager he came across The Origin of the Species and after staying up all night reading it he found atheism. “God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just,” he said. When asked how he could be sure, he gave his friend a copy of Darwin. This lack of belief in God was not just a simple atheism but also rather a bitter anti-theism. When he went to visit an old church with a friend who was the son of a priest, Stalin encouraged him to pull down an icon, smash it and urinate on it. “Not afraid of God?” asked Stalin. “Good for you!”
Now, of course, comes the standard retort from our atheist friends: “Stalin was an atheist – so what? He also had a moustache, but you don’t blame everyone who has a moustache for Stalinism”. I hope you can see the facetiousness of that argument. If Stalin had attacked barbers, or sought to impose moustaches on everyone, then it would be relevant. The reason he destroyed churches, banned Christianity from public education and sent thousands of Christians to their deaths was not because he had a moustache! Furthermore, this argument misses the point somewhat. Stalin (and, incidentally, Hitler) did not believe there was an afterlife, or a Jesus to whom they would have to give account when they died. Therefore they felt free to use their ‘absolute’ power to do as they pleased, as they were ultimately answerable to no one. It is a logical consequence of atheistic politics.
Hitchens argues that “if religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.” Can you see where that leads? Not to tolerance and freedom but to suppression, closing schools and banning books which do not agree with the atheist agenda. When their Brave New World just does not happen atheists will just get more and more frustrated – and as they have replaced God with the State, they will seek to use the State to suppress and intimidate. We are already beginning to see tasters of that in British society where in the name of tolerance and diversity, biblical Christianity is increasingly not tolerated, nor allowed to be part of the ‘diverse’ community that people say they want.
And its not just biblical Christianity. Universities in the UK and the US are rapidly becoming bastions of intolerance where any view which does not fit the liberal zeitgeist is ‘no-platformed’ or excluded by the whole concept of ‘safe space’. In a recent poll, more than a third of students surveyed thought UKIP should be banned from speaking at any university. Pro-life groups have been banned and even people like Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell have been censored. If you want to keep tabs on how freedom of speech, thought and religion are being attacked, then have a look at the wonderful Marxist writer Brendan O’Neill, whose incisive commentary on this growing intolerance is spot on.
On the other hand, in cultures where biblical Christianity has thrived there is greater freedom for a diversity of views. I find it ironic that the anti-religious Christopher Hitchens preferred to move to one of the most religious countries in the world, the US, rather than stay in an increasingly secularised Western Europe. As his brother Peter points out, the worst place to be an atheist is in an atheist country, the best place is in a Christian country.
In the dumbed down, consumerist, secular humanistic societies of the West, many of our people do not realise that the very things they say they prize, such as freedom, equality and diversity, are in fact founded upon a Christian view of society and humanity. If you take away the roots then the fruits will stay on the tree for a while, but they will not last and indeed, will soon be lost.
If I am given the cliché about religions restricting freedom I will always agree that it is true. Religion without Christ is always a bind. But so is anti-religion. Lets return to Rousseau. What many do not realise is the second part of the quote. After stating “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” Rousseau added: “One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.” Will we ever be free?
The greatest limitation and threat to our freedom is sin – both ours and others. Greed, anger, lust, pride, selfishness and sin in all its forms are the chains that bind. Who can save us from ourselves? That is where the Good News comes in. Jesus Christ said that he was the truth and if we knew the truth we would be set free. It is an enormous claim, but one that millions of us can testify to. “My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose went forth, and followed Thee”.
This weeks recommended book is a small but powerful one that shows how we can obtain freedom from our selves: Tim Keller’s wonderful The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness.

Published in Christian Today   20 May 2016

While the Church is one of the greatest ‘apologias’ for the gospel, it is also often the weakest link. How many people say they cannot believe the gospel because they see those who say they believe acting in a way that is contrary to their profession of faith?
In other words they are hypocrites. And nobody likes hypocrites.
Just think of the politician who campaigns on ‘family values’ while conducting numerous affairs, or the businessman who supports a charity arguing for economic justice while paying a pittance to his underage workers, or the sportsman who wins a sporting award while taking drugs.
Then there are the hypocritical statements of those in public life, who attack someone while they are alive and laud them when they are dead. Or the national hypocrisies – this April more than 400 African refugees died in attempting to cross the Mediterranean. The story appeared in a few newspapers but was quickly overtaken by the death of the pop star Prince. Granted he was a celebrity and in our celebrity culture his death is more newsworthy, but why were buildings not lit and numerous column inches devoted to the 400 rather than to the one?
As a society we talk about equality, but ironically it appears that in our media world, death is not the great equaliser – it is the ultimate way of showing who really matters.
All you have to do is pick up today’s newspaper to see numerous examples of hypocrisy. So why is it considered such a big deal when it occurs within the Church? Why is it such a ‘defeater’ belief?
It’s because we are held to a higher standard.
This is not a new problem. Augustine warned in his City of God: “The heretics themselves also, since they are thought to have the Christian name and sacraments, Scriptures, and profession, cause great grief in the hearts of the pious, both because many who wish to be Christians are compelled by their dissensions to hesitate, and many evil-speakers also find in them matter for blaspheming the Christian name, because they too are at any rate called Christians.”
Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall has her main character telling the King: “May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery?…What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness – their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery?”
Anyone with access to the internet will soon come up with enough stories of hypocrisy within the Church to turn anyone off Christianity. Whether it’s church child abuse being covered up, financial fraud or sexual scandals, there is more than enough to justify the charge.
When U2 sang ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’ during the Joshua Tree album tour in the late 1980’s, one line in that song stood out – [TV evangelists] “stealing money from the old, the sick and the poor…well the God I believe in isn’t short of cash, mister”.
The fact that people use religion to exploit other people is clear. The sadness for me is that the beautiful Good News of Jesus is distorted and perverted in this way. Bono explained his revulsion as a believer to this kind of behaviour: “I go to America and I turn on my television set, and I start sweating profusely because these guys have turned faith into an industry. It’s appalling. It’s ugly – the guy’s hand is virtually coming out of the television set.”
It’s not only religious people who use religion to make money. A church in London asked me to debate Christopher Hitchens, something I would have been delighted to do. He agreed and it looked as though we would be able to go ahead with it, until we received the demands from his agent: two first-class return tickets from New York to London and $50,000. When the church said that that was still way beyond their means the agent said that churches in the US were prepared to pay that kind of money. More fool them. (It is beyond ironic that Richard Dawkins and his supporters are happy to accuse those who dare to write challenging his words of being “fleas seeking to make a living off a dogs back” while he himself has made millions rehashing old, tired arguments about the non-existence of God, and how those who say they believe in God are either ignorant or just out to make money.)
So what is our answer?

1. Recognise that we are all guilty of hypocrisy.

When someone tells me that the church is full of hypocrites I agree with them and then invite them to church, pointing out that they would fit in very well! The existence of hypocrisy in the church is just further evidence of the Bible’s teaching that we are all hypocritical sinners.

2. Understand what Jesus thinks about hypocrisy.

“You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men'” (Matthew 15: 7-9).

3. Be thankful that Jesus died for hypocrites.

It is while we were still his enemies, while we were still faking it, while we were ‘inauthentic’, that Christ died for us. His blood cleanses from all sins – including hypocrisy. The trouble with hypocrisy is that once you have started you can’t stop. One lie leads to another until your whole life gets built on a lie. You can’t destroy it all and begin again. But Christ can. Those who trust in him are forgiven, reborn and set free to serve.

4. Get real with Christ.

When asked about hypocrisy in the church I always ask the questioner: “But do you know any real Christians?” In my former church in the village of Brora, in the Scottish Highlands, I was astounded at how it was always the same people who were mentioned. Wee Margaret, Big Margaret, Ross the lorry driver, Angus the carpet fitter, Big Donald the Mill worker…people who lived unpretentious, unglamorous lives for the Lord. In some people’s eyes they would not be regarded as special. In the Lord’s eyes they were his saints – his precious jewels. And in the eyes of many in the world they were recognised as such. Men saw their good deeds and glorified their Father in heaven.
Christ gives us the freedom to be real. We don’t need to pretend to be better than we are. We know what the Bible says about our sin. We don’t need to crave acceptance and plaudits from the world, because we have been accepted by God. We know that it is pointless putting on the hypocrite’s mask because our all-seeing God knows us better than we know ourselves. At last we are free to be real – in all our beautified ugliness.
In a world that hypocritically condemns hypocrisy in the Church, the only answer to that charge is for real Christians to live out real lives serving our real Lord. Before I became a Christian I had lots of mocking questions, answers and accusations for Christians. The answer that blew me away was seeing and experiencing real Christianity among real Christians. Their lives asked me questions that I could not answer and ultimately led to their source – Jesus Christ. Some Christians ask for power to perform great miracles, or give great talks, or donate great sums of money. I just ask for power to live a real Christian life. Lord, grant holiness, not hypocrisy.
This weeks recommended books: Real Christianity, William Wilberforce (Baker Publishing Group); Real Christian: Bearing the Marks of Authentic Faith, Todd Wilson (Zondervan).

Published in Christian Today   22 April 2016

So we have been talking about Jesus, the beginnings of the Church and its history, but what about today? Church was fine in the 19^th Century and, in a kind of English country village way, in the 20^th. But apart from a few redneck areas in the US, Northern Ireland, the Western Isles of Scotland and some backward parts of the world, isn’t it the case that modern humanity has just outgrown the need for God? The church is in its dying throes and the sooner we come to our senses the better. It’s a common perception but…
Is it what is really happening? John Gray, the atheist philosopher, mocks his fellow atheists’ rather unrealistic faith in this regard. He states that they believe that “the grand march of secular reason would continue, with more and more societies joining the modern west in marginalising religion. Someday, religious belief would be no more important than personal hobbies or ethnic cuisines.” But that is not happening. A Pew research study shows that by 2050 it is expected that only 13 per cent of the world’s population will not be religious, compared to 16 per cent today. Although the growth of the non-religious is expected to continue in the West. And therein lies the problem. This is all about a limited Western perception.

Published in Christian Today 15 April 2016

If the Church is supposed to be the ultimate apologetic for Christ (“all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”), it seems as though the case for Christ is very weak! The general attitude is perhaps summed up best by the famous quote attributed to Mahatma Ghandi: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
Never mind the fact that people who say this often know very little about Christ. It is an effective argument because it contains a grain of truth and because it means that the Christian message can be summarily dismissed on the basis that Christians are human! We are the victims of the ultimate ad hominem arguments. According to the Oxford English dictionary ad hom is: “(Of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining”. It really means to play the man, rather than the argument. “An ad hominem argument is one that relies on personal attacks rather than reason or substance.” There you are trying to tell people about Jesus and you get hit with everything wrong that any Christian/Church is supposed to have done – whether it is last week’s subject ‘Christianity spread by violence‘ or the Spanish Inquisition, Westboro Baptist Church or of course that perennial favourite – Hitler.
I am astonished at how many atheists must have read Mein Kampf, given the number of times the quote about Hitler calling Jesus his Lord is used. The trouble is that for the vast majority this is all they have read (usually from another atheist blog/website). They have not read the book, they don’t know the context and history of the period and they know precious little about the life and thoughts of Adolf Hitler. This quote is enough for them (combined with the fact that he was baptised as a Catholic).
In this regard it is important to remember that a statement without a context just becomes a pretext for whatever particular prejudice we want to put forward. Christians of course can be as guilty of this as anyone else – I have read some incredible statements from Christians that are made without any supporting evidence other than “I read it somewhere”. The deathbed conversion of Charles Darwin is one such ‘urban myth’. But the trouble is that in this era of historical, religious and philosophical illiteracy, it is all too easy for people to surf the web and find ‘evidence’ for what they believed in the first place. It’s called confirmation bias.
But if you can it’s great to get people to do something really old fashioned – read and think. Once you begin to examine the evidence it is astonishing just how much influence for good Christianity has had on our society.
Do you remember this hilarious Monty Python sketch where John Cleese, acting as the leader of a Jewish liberation group, asks ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?”.

One of his followers mentions the aqueducts. The others go on to mention a long list of things which results in Cleese finally asking: ‘What have the Romans ever done for us – apart from sanitation, the roads, irrigation, medicine, education, public health, the wine, law and order, and peace!”
What have the Christians ever done for us? While we can list the faults of those who profess to be Christians who have done great harm, the good done in the name of Christ is quite astonishing. “The gospel not only converts the individual, but it changes society. On every mission field from the days of William Carey, the missionaries carried a real social gospel. They established standards of hygiene and purity, promoted industry, elevated womanhood, restrained anti-social customs, abolished cannibalism, human sacrifice and cruelty, organised famine relief, checked tribal wars, and changed the social structure of society.” (Samuel Zwemer, Professor of Missions at Princeton)
Education (every major European university was founded on Christian principles), social reform, medicine, democracy, the arts and modern science all owe much of their current existence to the teaching and ideas of the followers of Jesus Christ. That’s a bold claim but one I think that can be substantiated. Take, for example, the question of science. As many have recognised, rather than being suppressed by the Church, modern science stems from a theistic culture and indeed would have been impossible without the understanding that there was an ordered universe created by God. Strangely I find that faith in Christ and science go together, feeding off one another. “Far from belief in God being some sort of irrational leap of faith it is the most rational hypothesis there is; and perhaps it is the only plausible and sure foundation of the rationality of the universe that science presupposes.” (Keith Ward)
It’s not just science. What we consider ‘modern’ values such as equality, tolerance and freedom are the fruits of Christianity as well. In a fascinating and detailed book, Inventing the Individual, The Origins of Western Liberalism, Larry Siedentop argues that all of these ideals stemmed from the early and medieval Church. Vishnal Mangalwadi is an Indian who has written a compelling account (The Book that Made your World), of how the Bible has been formative in the development of modern Western society. When we ask the question, what did the Christians give to us, modern Western society should recognise that it is the foundation of everything. The question then becomes what happens when you lose the foundation? Will the walls come down and the roof fall in?
My own small nation of Scotland sent doctors, engineers, military men, politicians and missionaries all over the globe. For many the primary motivating factor was their Christian faith. We were one of the most literate and educationally advanced nations in the world, thanks largely to John Knox’s maxim that where there was a church there should be a school. I don’t think it is without significance that as Scotland has rapidly secularised, so we have rapidly dumbed down with one in five Scots now being functionally illiterate.
Speaking of education I went to the University of Edinburgh founded by the Church, funded by a welfare state established on Christian principles, to study history. One of my specialist subjects was on the English Civil War and as part of that I had to read a book by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down. I loved it and learned a great deal from it; although I disagreed with his pre-supposition that God had nothing to do with the tremendous social, political and economic changes at that time. In fact the Bible verse which provided the title of that book (Acts 17:6) has become a kind of theme verse for my own ministry in and through the church. Tolstoy in his agonising about society and how to transform mused that everyone seemed to think about changing society, no one thought about changing their own hearts. The radicalness of Christianity is that it changes society by changing people.
The fact is that from the time of Christ, his Church, with all its faults and imperfections, has fulfilled his mission. His work has continued and the world has been turned upside down.
Let me finish with one more story. History is not about memes, myths or Internet confirmation basis. It is about examining facts and primary sources. A woman called Traudl Junge wrote her story towards the end of her life. She made a fascinating comment about her boss:
“Sometimes we also had interesting discussions about the church and the development of the human race. Perhaps it’s going too far to call them discussions, because he would begin explaining his ideas when some question or remark from one of us had set them off, and we just listened. He was not a member of any church, and thought the Christian religions were outdated, hypocritical institutions that lured people into them. The laws of nature were his religion. He could reconcile his dogma of violence better with nature than with the Christian doctrine of loving your neighbour and your enemy. ‘Science isn’t yet clear about the origins of humanity,’ he once said. ‘We are probably the highest stage of development of some mammal which developed from reptiles and moved on to human beings, perhaps by way of the apes. We are a part of creation and children of nature, and the same laws apply to us as to all living creatures. And in nature the law of the struggle for survival has reigned from the first. Everything incapable of life, everything weak is eliminated. Only mankind and above all the church have made it their aim to keep alive the weak, those unfit to live, and people of an inferior kind.”
Her boss was Adolf Hitler.
Sometimes when one reads, thinks and examines the evidence, it is possible to come to an understanding of truth in history. History is His story. The more you delve in, the more you understand, the more you see that history is a confirmation of the Bible’s basic teaching about God and man, and about the central figure of that history – the God man before whom everything is Before Christ and after whom everything is AD Anno Domini (the year of our Lord).

Published in Christian Today   08 April 2016

“These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also”
Acts 17:6

The life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus would have been useless to us unless we heard about it. Jesus ascending to heaven would just mean that he had gone. If, as looked highly likely, the early Church had been strangled at birth, then the past 2,000 years of Church history wouldn’t have happened and Jesus would have been just another Palestinian peasant executed by the brutal Roman Empire. The survival and growth of the Christian Church over the past 2,000 years is itself miraculous. When Christ said “I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it”, he meant it. And he has been proved true.
But now you get hit with one of the biggest objections: ‘That’s all very well, and maybe Jesus is OK – but look at the Church!’
The instinct of many Christians is to immediately say: ‘Don’t look at the Church’. But the trouble is, Jesus says the opposite. He says that people will see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven. He says that all men will know that we are his disciples because of our love. And most astonishingly, he says that our relationship with the Triune God is the ultimate evidence of the Son being sent (John 17:21). So the neat escape clause of ‘Don’t look at us, look at Jesus’ doesn’t work. The Church is one of the great evidences for Jesus.
Our non-Christian friends (and many of our Christian friends) when they think of the history of the Church will immediately play a word association game. Church = the Crusades, the burning of witches, the Inquisition. The cultural supremacy of the atheistic mind-set in the 20th Century has resulted in a re-writing of history so that the narrative is one in which the Church is associated with these host of negatives. It is a caricature, but like all caricatures there is an element of truth within it and therefore even Christians have fallen into the trap of distancing ourselves from the history of the Church. Doubtless you have heard the line: ‘I like Jesus, but I don’t like the Church’. This is often said by people who don’t know either Jesus or the Church, but are just going by impression and feeling.
As a historian I love reading and thinking about history and would recommend strongly that you actually do read books and primary sources if possible, rather than just rely on Google and Wikipedia. In terms of reading I would like to recommend the excellent series by Nick Needham,2,000 Years of Christ’s Power and three superb books by Mike Reeves: The Breeze of the Centuries, The Unquenchable Flame and On Giants Shoulders.  These are general popular introductions.

The early Church

The second part of Luke’s two-part account of the early Church (his first being the Gospel of Luke) is known as the Acts of the Apostles. His introduction to that is fascinating: “In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen.” (Acts 1:1-2) You will note that he speaks of what Jesus began to do and to teach – the implication being that his teaching and doing continued after he ascended into heaven. The book of Acts records how the early Church was birthed, developed and grown, spreading from Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, to its ending with Paul’s house arrest in Rome. It is a fascinating story of courage, persecution, miracles, new churches and incredible growth. From the very beginning, the Christian Church has always been a missionary Church.
The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus written less than 100 years after the death of Christ indicates one of the reasons why Christians had such an impact in the Roman Empire:
“The Christians are distinguished from other men, neither by country, nor language, nor the customs they observe. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as Barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the nations in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life…They marry as do all; they beget children, but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.”(The Anti-Nicene Fathers, Vol 1)
A pagan writer, Lucian of Samosta, in AD 170 gave his reasons for the growth of Christianity: “The Christians you know, worship a man to this day – the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account… You see, these misguided creatures start with the general conviction that they are immortal for all time, which explains their contempt of death and their voluntary self-devotion which are so common among them; and then it was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws.” Apart from the fact that Christians were prepared to die for their faith (note that they were not prepared to kill for their faith), this testimony reminds me of the words of Christ: ‘all men will know you are my disciples if you have love one for another”.

What is the Church?

Augustine said that he who does not have the Church for his mother cannot have God for his father. Which leads us to ask – what is the Church? It is the ecclesia. The called out assembly of the people of God. There are different understandings of just exactly how a church should be governed, and there are different understandings of secondary doctrines in terms of theology and doctrine, but I would argue that the Church of Jesus Christ is one through all the ages and is, as Christ himself taught, his bride. I realise it can get very confusing with all the different denominations and claims and counter-claims. For me, I don’t really have that much difficulty. God has preserved and kept his Church in many different forms and will continue to do so. In fact, it could be argued that the very flexibility of the Church and its ability to adapt to different cultures is one of the reasons it has continued to grow.
The key element, though, has to be that the Church is the Church of Jesus Christ. He founds it, he is the cornerstone, and when she moves away from Christ she stops being the Church. Calvin summarised it well: “I am only saying that the blessed and happy state of the Church always had its foundation in the person of Christ.”
There is a basic simple point here: Christ is the foundation of the Church. Not nationality. Not class. Not priests, kings or queens. He is the foundation and the head. How much trouble would have been avoided if those that call themselves Christians and Churches had remembered and practiced this! Calvin also said: “In the church are mingled many hypocrites who have nothing of Christ but the name and outward appearance.” Our atheist friends are very clever here – they mix and match two doctrines. Firstly, they agree with Jesus’ teaching about hypocrisy being one of the worst sins and gleefully point out the hypocrisies of many who claim the name of Christ. Then they put their own hypocritical doctrine of equality into the equation (hypocritical because they exclude themselves), and declare that it would not be right to condemn just one particular person or group – so lets condemn them all! If one Christian does something wrong, then all Christians are to be blamed. If one church gets something wrong then all are tainted. Guilt by association. If we point out that this is a shallow and superficial view and does not take into account either the Bible’s own teaching that all people including Christians are sinners and therefore of course Christians are going to do things that are wrong; nor the obvious observation that not every group that professes to be a church is a church, they protest ‘but who are you to judge?’. And thus in the name of being non-judgemental, they judge us all.
Of course there are going to be hypocrites and false churches but just because there is the false it does not exclude the real. Counterfeit banknotes only exist because real ones do. Counterfeit Christianity only exists because there is real Christianity. Sadly of course throughout history and still today there have been those who shame the name of Christ, by living lifes contrary to the faith they profess. This is even worse when it is church leaders who do so. Forgive me for citing Calvin again – “How often did Christ and his apostles foretell that pastors would pose the greatest dangers to the church?”

Did Christianity spread by violence?

There is no doubt that once the Apostle Paul was told to go west to Greece, rather than east to Asia, European and world history was changed. The world was turned upside down (Acts 17). When the Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity in 312, it marked the transformation of the Church from being a persecuted and much maligned minority to eventually becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. We can argue about how much that was a good or bad thing, but from that point on for many European countries and for most of subsequent European history, Church and State were intertwined. This means that we run into a problem when we consider the whole question of whether the Church used violence. So, for example, were the Crusades primarily religious, political or economic? Did the Church burn witches, or was it councils and governments? We really need to find out the facts as well as the context of what is involved.
Many people seem to have the idea that the Church burnt or drowned millions of witches and that the Inquisition was responsible for death of hundreds of thousands more. But the nearest figures we have are that perhaps 40,000 women were killed as witches over a period of two hundred years – that is 200 per year over the whole of Europe. It is of course 200 too many, but still a different story to that which is often portrayed. As for the Inquisition, the last figures I saw suggested that there were 6,000 deaths over 500 years. That is horrendous and I would not attempt to justify or excuse it in the name of Christ, but again it is not quite the story that we are led to believe.
The trouble is that once the Church had political power, it became necessary if you wanted political power to belong to the Church. Then of course it becomes very difficult to distinguish between those who belong to the Church because they follow Jesus and those who belong to the Church because they want the power. And we must admit there are those who do have a false theology (i.e. Jesus wants us to burn heretics) who in their religious zeal cause a great deal of harm. Zeal without knowledge and love is always dangerous, but perhaps especially so when it is linked with religion. As Pope Benedict said: “The temptation to use power to secure the faith has risen again and again in varied forms throughout the centuries, and again faith has risked being suffocated in the embrace of power.”
Please don’t equate everything that is done in the name of Christ with Christ. But then some will ask: ‘Is that not having it both ways?’ When we see some of the good coming from Christianity we claim it, but when we see the bad, we disclaim it. Can I suggest that it is a little more nuanced than that? I accept fully that Christians and Churches, including me and mine, will do things that are wrong and even evil. I accept that because I see it, and also because I believe what Jesus says about the pervasiveness of human sinfulness. However I also accept that though we are still sinners, it is possible to know them by their fruits. Any work of God in a human being will demonstrate something of the fruit of the Spirit, and any church of Christ, will show something of the beauty of Christ – in the midst of all the sin and ugliness.
The Christian way is not about power but about the way of the cross – and every generation needs to learn that.