The Blog of Christ Church Central

[This is the transcript of Andy's talk from the Purpose for Life mission in March '09. You can listen to the talk here].

There is no doubt that we are living in a scientific era. If a time machine was to bring someone from 1909 to modern day Sheffield, it would surely seem like landing on a different planet and the vast majority of changes would be directly or indirectly due to the onward march of science. And science is brilliant isn’t it and by science I mean the body of knowledge we call science as well as the process of experimentation to get answers.

Today, we know incomparably more about the Universe we inhabit than ever before. Whether it is about the subatomic particles that everything is made of, the DNA in all our cells coding vital instructions about our makeup, the organisms that inhabit this planet alongside us or the Solar system and far off galaxies; our knowledge is extensive and ever-increasing.

But it is not just knowledge that science offers, science has massively changed our way of life, bringing improvements to almost every sphere of our existence, like medicine, communication agriculture and leisure (to name just 4).

For some of the big problems this world faces, the best hope for the future seems like it will be found in science. Whether it is dealing with climate change, producing enough food for the Earth’s increasing population or dealing with a long list of devastating illnesses and medical conditions – all eyes are on scientific research.

But what of faith – is there any place left for it in this modern age? Compared to science’s rigorous methodologies and of course it’s tangible results, the world of faith seems somewhat lacking. It seems old fashioned and irrelevant, an embarrassment in this day and age. Whilst science offers so much for our futures, faith just seems like some crutch from the past that helped people get on with their lives when they understood little about the world around them.

But what do we actually mean by faith and is it only the religious who have faith?

Faith is defined by one famous, atheistic, Oxford based, Biologist as…

“…The great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence…Faith is not allowed to justify itself by argument.”

To be honest if that is faith then I agree – what a cop out! If religions, and lets be more specific here, this is an openly Christian event, if Christians and their Bible define faith in those terms, then I am against it. Anything that cannot be knocked about in the arena of evidence is not something I want anything to do with. The thing is, no Christian would define faith in such terms, it is a great example of a straw man, being set up and then knocked down. If I define faith in my terms then I can ridicule it on my terms.

If on the other hand we really consider what Christians and the Bible think faith is then we will see this particular atheist has a bit more work to do to convince me that faith is as laughable as he says it is…

The only type of faith in the Bible that is praised is faith in God; this faith is a confidence or a trust in God because He is known to be trustworthy. People are praised for having faith when they trust God despite being in difficult situations where it would be hard for the person to believe in God and accept what he has told them. Hebrews 11, a great chapter devoted to the topic of faith, states that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen.” But again this is not a pie-in-the-sky hope; it is a confident trust in God. The many people that the chapter then goes on to hold up as our “faith role models” had lots of reasons to trust in God, but their lives were still hard as they had to trust and look into the future. They were praised for living by faith, not sight, for believing not despite the evidence but when everything and everyone around them was telling them to give up on God.

If we then look at how Christian thinkers understand faith, again we see not blind faith, but faith built on evidence.

One theologian puts it like this:

Faith “affects the whole of man’s nature. It commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of the heart or emotions based on conviction, and it is crowned in the consent of the will, by means of which the conviction and confidence are expressed in conduct.”

If you missed that he just said evidence affects our emotions, and these two together affect our actions.

So to start with we cannot throw faith out simply on the basis of a made up, and inaccurate definition. But there is a further complication. The very sceptics that criticise religion for their faith actually need faith too, but whereas a Christian would acknowledge this, they deceptively pretend they are just going on the facts.

We all have our own worldview, which will colour the way we look at the world and it’s important to know what our worldview is to ensure that our take on the evidence is not biased. But, instead of remaining objective as scientists should, many science writers have let their own worldview’s determine the conclusions they reach. Some have claimed that if only we would stick to the facts we would see that there is no God, no meaning to life, no purpose other than to pass on our selfish genes! We are only here through chance and the choices we make in life are largely immaterial as our genes predetermine our actions.

But this is not hard fact, this is a philosophy dressed up as science. Science has NOT conclusively disproved God, no experiment has set out to find the meaning of life, and no evidence proves that genes determine our every action. The claim that the only option for an honest enquirer faced with the scientific evidence is to reject God is just ludicrous – the most Science can lead us to is agnosticism – scratching our heads and saying we just don’t know.

This is partly because of the methodological materialism that science has to use in order to investigate cause and effect, but without reference to God. Note this doesn’t mean Scientists have to be atheists, it merely means they seek to leave God out in any explanatory capacity. With God out of the frame, so to speak, it is impossible for science then to comment on his existence! This is just not in science’s job description. Taking scientific findings into the realms of philosophy also damages real science, as one writer puts it: “When proponents of scientific thinking move to become prophets of life and meaning, science is weakened for it cannot sustain such a role.”

On top of all that even good science requires us to have faith (as long as we mean trust, not the blind faith version) we must believe the findings of individual scientists and their peer reviewers. We have to have faith that this is a universe governed by solid dependable laws otherwise we would have no basis for even doing science.

So we need to move away from facing off science and faith – they are not enemies. Indeed we all have faith, just in different things. Let me give you an example:

Some people may think climbers are mad. There they are hanging onto a cliff with their fingers, wearing funny rubber boots, protected from falling to their death only by a thin rope held in place by a few tiny bits of metal and the quick reactions of their buddy holding the other end of the rope. But the reality is, if you get into climbing, you see that rather than it being an act of madness it is a very reasonable and exhilarating way to spend your day. The ropes and gear are tested to incredible limits – they will hold me! – whether you trust the person belaying you and your placement of gear is another thing. But the point is it is faith – reasonable faith (or trust) in your kit, your skill and your friend. We put similar faith into action when we sit on a chair! We look at it and weigh up whether it will hold us and then if we are convinced that it will we sit on it.

As soon as we shift to thinking of faith as trust we can see that it is crazy to see faith as some inexplicable quality of a person – in the sense that someone might think when they say “I wish I had your faith!” Instead it shifts the focus from the person with the faith to the object of that faith.

When Christians put their faith in Jesus, they are not blindly leaping into the dark, instead on the basis of evidence they believe it is reasonable to do so. Facts and objective reasoning will on their own get you to being a Christian – but that is true for any worldview, perhaps particularly atheism!

Indeed, it was deliciously ironic earlier this year, that the British Humanist Society (an atheistic group that is convinced there is no God) had to add the “probably” into their bus campaign stating unconvincingly “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” That’s really reassuring isn’t it…probably? But what if there is? I am worrying now more than ever! The slogan ended up sounding like a philosophical version of the Carlsberg ad.

The Christians conviction is that there is enough evidence to remove the probably and scrub out the no – “there is a God, enjoy living His way!”

If you look at the evidence for Christianity – the way the Bible hangs together even though it was written over thousands of years, the remarkable life of Jesus Christ – a man who is very hard to categorise except using his own words, his strange death and then the claimed resurrection, the changed life of his disciples from scared men to people who turned the world upside down. And Christians would add to that their personal experience of God today and the impact He can have on our lives. When all these things are considered, we are not forced to be believers, but it is becomes reasonable to have faith in Jesus Christ.

The Bible talks about great people of faith who believed God because they had seen his acts and knew him to be trustworthy. Living today thousands of years later, if anything we have even more reason to trust in God, as we see how the Bible story pans out.

All the way through the Old Testament God promised to restore the broken relationship between Him and His those he has created, in the New Testament, we see God sending his Son Jesus to die on a cross in our place, taking our punishment. Through Jesus it is possible for us to be forgiven and to start a new friendship with God. This shows us that God does keep his promises even thousands of years later.

One of the Bible writers, Paul, sums up his feelings on the good news that comes through Jesus (which he shorthands as the gospel):

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek [that is all who aren’t Jews]. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” Romans 1:16-17

The righteousness of God is the way we can be made right with God – this comes through faith. That means that in order to have our relationship set right with God we have to have faith and trust Him and the gospel. Not through keeping rules or being good, or in fact doing anything at all, but simply by believing. All we have to do is have faith in Jesus and what he did on the cross.

Finally, faith should always lead to action – we can assent that something is true, but we don’t truly have faith in it unless we act on that faith, whether that is climbing a wall, sitting on a chair, believing the findings of a scientist or becoming a Christian. If something is worthy of our faith we must act on that.

I would maintain that Christianity is not anti-Science, and rightly understood Science itself is not anti-Christian. My conviction is that when we see a contradiction between the Bible and science, we have either done bad science or bad Bible study.

So if you have never looked into Christianity – then can I encourage you to consider what your faith is in, and then consider the person of Jesus Christ? Pick up a gospel and read about Him, see whether he fits into the neat box you always put him in. You may well find him harder to dismiss than you thought. If you are not convinced when you consider him that there is something more to pursue, then you have lost nothing. But if there is something in it and you reject Jesus because of preconceived prejudices or because you have accepted the dogmatic words of another then you stand to lose everything.

[This is the transcript of Crofty's talk from the Purpose for Life mission in March '09. You can listen to the talk here].

OK…thanks very much for coming tonight – it’s great to have you with us. Hope you’re enjoying the music and the coffee and the conversation. We’ll get back to some more of that later, but we’re going to spend the next few minutes thinking about this subject of ‘love in a broken society’. I’m basically just going to try and answer two questions: what’s the problem, and what’s the solution?

What’s the problem? Is there even a problem? Well, I don’t think you’d have to spend too long browsing the newspapers to conclude that there is something broken about our society. I think it was The Sun who first labelled our nation “Broken Britain” – but the phrase has since been picked up by politicians and the media at large. And every new social scandal is a symptom of this broken society, whether it’s Alfie Patten, a father at 13, or the tragic death of Baby P, or Karen Matthews kidnapping her own daughter, or the shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool.

Those are the high-profile cases, the extreme ones that make the headlines, but this brokenness is part of ordinary day-to-day life for many of us – whether it’s broken families, problems with neighbours or just, for some people, a general sense of loneliness and isolation. And, if anything, it looks like religion only makes things worse – because it causes divisions and hatred and wars and fractures our society even further.

I could easily spend the next ten minutes bombarding you with statistics to ram home the message that there’s something broken about our society – although I’m not sure how constructive that would be. But we’re not stupid – I love Sheffield, but even in Sheffield we’re in a city that has problems with crime and violence and homelessness and drug abuse and prostitution and unemployment and poverty.

And the local problems pale in comparison to the global ones. We don’t just live in a broken society – we live in a broken world, full of poverty and war and suffering and injustice.

So what can we do about it? I think that we can respond in one of three ways: we can deny the situation, accept the situation or change the situation. And the first two don’t really seem very satisfactory to me – to deny that there’s a problem just seems intellectually dishonest. But maybe we’re tempted to ignore the problem – which is really just a more subtle form of denial. OK – we aren’t saying there’s nothing wrong, but we’re living as if nothing’s wrong. But, even though I’m often guilty of it, I don’t think it’s a satisfactory response to the brokenness we see around us.

So, we could accept the situation. We could say, “Well, crime and poverty and all the associated problems are really just inevitable. Sure, in an ideal world those things wouldn’t exist, but we’re not in an ideal world – so we just have to deal with it.” But if denial is intellectually dishonest, to me, acceptance seems morally dishonest. How can I really look at the messed-up world around me and honestly think that things are good enough? That they’re as good as they’re going to be? That hardly seems very loving.

Which only leaves us with one option: change the situation. And I guess that’s what many of us are trying to do, through campaigning, through giving to charities, through direct involvement in social action projects.

But how do we fix a broken society? Is love the answer? That’s kind of what our title suggests…and if you ask the right pop stars, it sounds like it is. For instance, Michael Jackson’s song Heal the World:

There’s a place in your heart

And I know that it is love

And this place could be much brighter than tomorrow

And if you really try

You’ll find there’s no need to cry

In this place you’ll feel there’s no hurt or sorrow

There are ways to get there

If you care enough for the living

Make a little space, make a better place…

Heal the world, make it a better place

For you and for me and the entire human race.

It’s a nice dream, isn’t it? Love healing the world. But seems like just that: a dream. It doesn’t seem very realistic.

A broken society isn’t a new problem – humans have been trying to fix it for hundreds, even thousands of years. And we don’t seem to have got very far. We try to apply love like a bandage to the wound, but it doesn’t seem to be enough – because as a race, despite the fact that we place a really high value on love, we just don’t seem to be very good at loving each other. Sure, there are some ways in which, for some people, life is better than it’s ever been. But there are some ways in which it’s much worse. And we seem powerless to change it.

And here’s where I want to bring God into the equation. Because Christians believe in a God who is powerful enough to change the situation. So what’s he doing about it? Is he ignoring it? Is he accepting it? Does he just not care? Does he just look at the Baby P story and shrug his shoulders? Or are his hands tied? It can be tempting to look at our broken society and see it as evidence that God doesn’t exist – or that, if he does exist, he’s a bit of a weak and distant God who doesn’t love people and isn’t involved.

Well, that’s not the sort of God that Christians believe in. We believe in a God who says, in the Bible:

“I, the LORD, love justice. I hate robbery and wrong.”

That’s just one example – I could have picked plenty more. And we believe in a God who’s in the business of fixing things – whose big plan for the world at the end of time is this, a promise from the last-but-one page of the Bible:

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. I will dwell with them, and they will be my people, and I myself will be with them as their God. I will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

That sounds attractive, doesn’t it? To believe in a God who is passionately concerned for social justice, who loves people enough to make a new society where there is no death or mourning or crying or pain? But is that just wishful thinking? How can we know that God feels that way or is going to act in that way? Sure, those are some fine-sounding words, but are they just words?

Well, as Christians we believe that God has demonstrated his love for our broken society and his commitment to fixing it. He’s demonstrated it in Jesus.

Here’s how it works: Jesus was a real guy who lived in Israel two thousand years ago, and in his early thirties started going around saying stuff like this:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

“I’ve come to fix things,” Jesus is saying. And he wasn’t all mouth and no trousers, because he then went and did a bunch of stuff to back it up. His society was pretty broken as well, and he showed his love – and showed he was God in the flesh – by going and healing the blind and feeding the hungry and even on a couple of occasions raising the dead. He went and fixed things in a way that only God could, and in a way that God had promised to do.

But then he went and got himself crucified. And it looked like the job wasn’t finished. So was Jesus no more powerful than any other philanthropist or do-gooder? Was he just the Bob Geldof of his day, who did what he could to fix social problems but ultimately found that the task was too big for him?

Well, I want to present an alternative view. Christians believe – and Jesus himself taught – that on the cross he was actually dealing with the real underlying problem that causes our broken society, the problem that afflicts each and every one of us: the problem of people.

What’s the real problem in society? Why can’t we all just love each other and get along? Well, I want to suggest that it’s something to do with the nature of people – specifically people living for themselves.

And this sort of me-first living – anything that isn’t God-first living – is what the Bible calls sin. If you try and make a society out of individuals who are deeply committed, whether they admit it or not, to me-first living, who are trapped in that mentality, it won’t be long before something breaks. Because me-first always means you-second. And God created a world in which actions have consequences, so me-first living will inevitably lead to a broken society.

So how does Jesus dying on a cross deal with the problem of me-first living? Well, if God’s big plan is to create that perfect society, he can’t just fill it with me-first individuals, because it’ll only break again. People need to be changed, they need to be remade, they need to be wired for you-first and God-first living. They need to be like Jesus – because he alone managed to perfectly do God-first living.

So here’s what’s going on at the cross: there’s a swap. Jesus faces the consequences of our me-first living, the punishment of death and isolation and separation from God. And anyone who trusts in Jesus, who believes the swap worked, gets to enjoy the consequences of God-first living: life with God for ever in his perfect, fixed society.

And so that we won’t ruin that society, God transforms Christians to be like Jesus, and have the same unconditional love he shows us. If you’re here, you probably know some Christians and you probably know that we’re not very much like Jesus…although some of us do have good beards. And that’s because we’re a long way from the finished article, and won’t get there in this life.

But, just as Christians are like little previews of the people we’ll one day be, the Christian society – the church – is meant to be a preview of God’s new, perfect society. How do we know God’s going to keep that massive promise he makes? Well, he’s already created a new society full of people who ought to be characterised by love: the church.

That’s why, for the last two thousand years, the church has been at the forefront of social action and attempts to fix the brokenness. Sure, we don’t always get it right – but we believe in a God who loved us enough to die for us, and that compels us to go and love others. That’s why the accounts of the early church are of a community of generosity and unity – where Jews and Greeks got on with each other, where slaves and masters worshipped God side by side, and where everyone’s material needs were catered for.

The broken society we live in should make us cry out that something isn’t right, that this can’t be the way it’s supposed to be. And God’s new society, the church, should be on hand to show people how things are supposed to be, and tell people how to get there – and I hope you agree it’s a really attractive proposition.

Love in a broken society. What’s the problem? Well, ultimately Christians believe that the problem is people. So is love the solution? Well, yes it is. But it’s the love of God, who so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life.