Some disconnected thoughts on All Saints Day

1. I'm guessing not many people in my ecclesiastical neck of the woods will be celebrating All Saints Day, and there are good reasons for that.  However, if we carefully observe that in biblical usage a 'saint' is not a believer of superior rank, but simply anyone who is sanctified (saint-ified) by union with the Lord Jesus through faith, that removes most of the theological objections.  All Saints Day is a day to remember the believers who have gone before us.

2. In our day, there has been a lot of helpful pushback against talk of 'heaven' as the Christian's ultimate destiny, with the more biblical emphasis on 'new creation' coming to the fore.  That is all to the good, but it would be a shame if in the recovery of the great Christian hope we lost something of the penultimate hope, which is to depart and be with Christ.  It is true that we will not all sleep, and we cannot say whether we are the generation that will not die but will see Christ's return - but many of our brothers and sisters have slept, have gone to be with the Lord, and it's right that we bear in mind that they are safe in heaven.

3. It is a huge encouragement to know that there are those who now enjoy something of what we will one day rejoice in forever.  It seems to me that the New Testament does not say that departed believers currently enjoy the vision of God which will captivate them for all eternity; there is a sense in which they cannot yet see the Lord as he is, because they are not wholly themselves - they await the resurrection at the Lord's appearing.  They currently rest in peace; they will rise in glory.  Like us, they do not yet know what they shall be.  But what a blessing to be in the presence of the Lord, even if it means being away from the body!  Better to be a doorkeeper in the house of our God...

4. There is real and living fellowship between those who have gone before and those of us who still labour on earth.  I don't think we have immediate access to the departed saints - I don't think we can or should pray to them, for example - but we have something in a sense more intimate than immediacy.  We are joined to Christ, and they are joined to Christ.  We are one body with them, united by the one Spirit.  They pray and praise above, we pray and praise below, and it is all taken up in one great worship service, presented before God as the offering of the whole church in Jesus.  When we gather we worship, we gather into their presence, because we gather to Christ and to the heavenly Zion.

5. All of this answers, with a firm and unsentimental reality, the dim groping after hope that we see in so much funeral mawkishness.  They are not dead, but have simply gone nextdoor - that sort of thing.  For the dead in Christ, how gloriously true it is that they are not really dead!  How we can rejoice in their comfort and joy!  In Christ they all live.  Alleluia.

The ethics of abortion

Abortion is in the news again, with the possibility that the landmark judgement in the USA which ensured the legality of abortion may soon be struck down.  Now, I preached Psalm 139 on Sunday as we celebrated new life, and with the affirmation that each baby is knit together in the womb by Almighty God very much ringing in my ears, it seems right to celebrate anything which might reduce the likelihood of this creative work of God being interrupted and thwarted by the destructive work of humanity.  It grieves me, frankly, that here in the UK abortion is hardly controversial; just a medical procedure, which we all tacitly agree to by funding it through our taxes and carrying it out through 'our NHS'.  It is not an ethical question in our society at large.  But it should be.

It is generally accepted that the newborn baby is a human being, fully deserving of all the protections which we typically accord to human beings and which we often bracket under the heading 'the sanctity of life' - a phrase which continues to be used even by people who don't really believe in sanctity as a concept at all.  Okay.  Let us take this as accepted.

So the question is this: what ethically significant change has there been in the baby?  He or she was in the womb, and now they are not; has that bestowed humanity on him or her?

Typically I don't think we would say so.  We talk about 'the baby' while she is still in the womb.  Sometimes we talk to the baby while she is still in the womb!  The baby is human, whether they have passed through the birth canal or not.  The onus is on the so-called 'pro-choice' advocate to show what the ethical difference is.

If not the birth canal, is it some other change earlier in pregnancy?  Is that why we typically limit the stage at which abortions can be carried out?  But what change is it that occurs, and why is it ethically significant?  Is it the ability to survive outside the womb?  If so, why is that ethically significant?

The logic of the 'pro-choice' position is that it is down to an expectant mother to decide whether the developing human being within her has value or not.  That is the logic.  You can try to wriggle out of it all you like, but there is no escaping the fact that what makes the difference between a foetus with no rights and a baby with rights rests in the will of another human being.

One human being gets to decide whether another human being has value or not.

There are lots of complicating factors, and I don't want to minimise them.  But I cannot see that any of those factors change the basic equation.  Is this an ethical position we're happy with?

Ah, but since abortions will happen anyway, shouldn't they be safe and regulated?  But there is no safe abortion for the baby involved.  And it matters what we as a society are prepared to sanction.  If we are talking about the taking of a powerless human life, then it matters that this be illegal even if it still happens.

I don't know how to make this a live issue again in British society.  Maybe, absent Christian presuppositions, it can't be done.  Maybe, as I've mused sadly before, we are past the point where ethical arguments can make headway against the 'sanctity of choice'.  But maybe it's just that this is another one of those areas where we believe things are important, but don't want to make things socially awkward by acting on our beliefs?

Whole humanity

I've recently finished reading Rowan Williams' book Christ the Heart of Creation, which was stimulating and also one of the most complex pieces of work I've come across.  This post is not about the book - I'm not confident I understood it well enough - but is about the thought processes it kicked off for me.  I found it particularly helpful to reflect on the fact that we should be thinking of the Creator-creation, infinite-finite dualities on the basis of the Incarnation, and not coming up with an abstract model into which the Incarnation of the Lord then has to be made to fit.  Any consideration of the question which doesn't begin with Jesus will, I think, always fail to do justice to him.  Space cannot be made for him in a system which is not wholly derived from him.  To be honest, from my very limited understanding I'm not sure this book passes the test.  Although it aims to build on Christ, the analogia entis takes over, and the Incarnation seems to become just a specific example of the non-competitive co-existence of infinite and finite.  I'm not sure what the personal union means in this model.

If that didn't make any sense to you, don't worry about it.  I'm not sure it made much to me.

The significant question that I came away asking was this: what is the pastoral/discipleship significance of the fact that in the Incarnation the Word of God took on a whole human nature?  The Word did not replace a part of the humanity, creating a divine-human hybrid; nor did the Word over-ride the humanity of Christ.  In Jesus we have a real and entire human being, living out in time the eternal life of the Word of God.  What does it mean for us that he was a whole human being?

Of course, there is the central issue of salvation: that which Christ has not assumed, he has not healed.  In other words, it is important to us that Christ is a whole human being, because we are whole human beings wholly in need of salvation.  By taking on human nature whole and entire, Christ has redeemed whole human beings, leaving no part of them to the dominion of sin.

Then there is the fact that in taking on a whole human nature, Christ affirms the goodness of human life as created.  It is not as if there is a 'wicked bit' of human nature which needs to be cut away.  This is in fact too small a view of sin: the human as we know him or her is wholly ruined; they do not just need a few parts changing.  It is also too low a view of God's creation: he made humanity good, and though each human being we meet is now a glorious ruin they are nonetheless glorious.

This has an effect on how we think about life.  Think about the caricature of the monk, shutting off various aspects of human life - sexuality, appetite - as the source of temptation.  Or think about the more legalistic aspects of fairly recent evangelical culture, which in their desire for holiness - or perhaps more, their fear of sin - tried to shut out aspects of human existence.  Or think about the new convert who can't see the value in anything which isn't directly 'spiritual'.  That Christ took on a whole human nature is a warning and a rebuke to all these tendencies.

The Gospels seem particularly unembarrassed by Jesus living a normal human life.  It is noteworthy that the Gospel with the most obviously high Christology - that of John - also contains some of the most obviously 'human' in the life of Jesus.  It is not wrong to be human.  It is not wrong to engage in, and enjoy, culture and work and food and family and conversation and...  well, life.  God did not need feel the need to over-ride or over-write the human in Christ; nor does he in you and me.  Live richly and well, and be glad.

On returning from a camping holiday

I love to camp.  I confess, I don't quite trust people who don't enjoy life under canvas.  Sorry if that's you.  I'm sure you have many other admirable qualities.

Two reflections on camping.  The first one is that camping really brings it home to you that creation is there.  I mean, I know we live in God's creation all the time; I'm aware that the city as well as the countryside belongs to God.  But there is something about sitting out in the countryside for a week that highlights the solidity, the given-ness, the sheer there-ness, of creation.  When I'm in the city, the built environment, I easily forget that the world is not something of our construction.  It doesn't belong to us, and we don't control it.  Even in the neatly and nicely tamed countryside of south Devon, how could anybody forget that we human beings didn't and couldn't shape the hills, didn't and couldn't bring forth the trees, didn't and couldn't set the rocky cliffs above the surging sea?  Waking up at night, one need only pop one's head outside to see stars - innumerable stars, more stars than you would imagine possible from within the artificially lit city.

Here's the paradox: what is a streetlamp compared to the countless stars of God?  And yet a streetlamp will cut off the view of the stars completely.  The city shrinks the world, makes it manageable.  I am not confronted by the heights and depths of God's wonderful creation, but only by the altogether manageable mediocrities of human construction.  It is good to be reminded that creation is there, because it reminds me that God is there.  Just as creation is only really hidden behind the pavements and houses, so God is only hidden behind the frenetic human activity of life.  Behind it all, he is there.

Second reflection: tent living is precarious.  It feels precarious, when the wind is up, but it's more than that.  Out there is the vast given-ness of God's world, and here I am, in a scrap of canvas, clinging to the earth of the creator's moulding.  The city, with all its concrete and control, makes me feel secure, in a way.  But I am not secure.  Maybe I did say in my prosperity "I shall never be moved" - but it was only God's favour that made it so.  One is reminded of that, in a tent.  Weather-dependent, in a way which you're not in the city, the conclusion that we are dependent, contingent - that is, or should be, impossible to avoid.  How fragile we are, and how fragile is everything that we construct and value.  All living really is tent living, although we cover it from ourselves with bricks and mortar.

And a reflection on coming home: one of the worst consequences of sin is that we are constantly seeking to be what we are not, to deny creational realities.  I think Adam before the fall could have built without ever forgetting that the work of his hands was really the work of God's hands.  I think he would have known and understood his contingency and fragility without being threatened by it - for what is contingency other than to be in the hands of the loving Father God?

But we are a fallen people, and always we are seeking to build our way out of creation, out of the need to acknowledge God, out of the fear of contingency.  Whether it is literal bricks and mortar, or the ideological bricks and mortar of godless philosophy, that is what we do.

I think a camping holiday might do us all good.

Thoughts about life

For reasons which will be obvious to anyone who follows the news, I've been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be 'pro-life' - and also what it doesn't mean.  What is a distinctly Christian approach to the ethical issues surrounding the beginning and end of human life?  Here are some thoughts, not all well developed at this stage.

1.  The theological foundations of a Christian pro-life stance are creation and Christology.  The doctrine of creation teaches us that each human being is made by God, in his image, and belongs to him.  Life - including my own life! - does not ultimately 'belong' to any of us, but to God.  That is why a human being cannot arbitrarily take another human being's life - consider Genesis 9:6.  Christology comes in because it is, if you like, the highest compliment that could be paid to human nature that God the Son took it on himself and became incarnate.  If we doubt the value of human life, the doctrine of the incarnation should be a sufficient rebuttal of those doubts.  We could also add that, de jure, each human life belongs once again to God, this time not only by right of creation but by right of redemption.

2.  The ethical implications of these foundations are sometimes very clear, and sometimes not so much.  I think that anyone who celebrates the Annunciation - I don't mean necessarily by keeping the feast, but by being gladdened by the angelic news of the incarnation - ought to recognise that Christ in his incarnation sanctifies human life from conception.  We ought to be pro-life in the narrower sense of 'against the deliberate ending of life in the womb'.  But we need to recognise that issues around end-of-life care just are more difficult.  There can be a moral difference, for example, between deliberately ending a life and withdrawing treatment - although both will end in death, and are undertaken in that knowledge.  We ought not to act or talk as if this stuff were simple and straightforward.

3.  To be pro-life is not the same as being anti-death.  One aspect of recognising the sanctity of life is recognising that the mystery of its end does not lie entirely within our power.  Thanks to medical advances, we can often delay death - but whether we ought to do so in every case is surely very doubtful.  Especially for the Christian, who believes in and looks for the resurrection of the dead, being pro-life ought not to mean 'prolonging life wherever possible regardless of other considerations'.

4.  It seems to me that many people - especially, I have to say, Americans - muddy the waters by confusing more than one issue.  For example, in some of the tragic issues involving children which have come up in the UK, American commentators have been quick to equate being pro-life with believing in absolute parental autonomy.  Some talk as if parents own their children's lives, something which I can't accept on theological principle (see 1, above), and some import the distinctly American (but not Christian) idea that the community and the state ought to have no input into tough decisions involving children.  This is an unhelpful blurring of issues, and particularly when it is being shouted across the Atlantic sounds a lot like real-life tragedies here are being used as ammunition for ongoing culture wars there.  (And as an aside, if the sanctity of life means anything, it means that issues of life must not be used in this way).

5.  A distinctive of Christian engagement with this issue ought to be a certain amount of calm.  Don't get me wrong: there should be anger when the sanctity of life is not respected, and there should be grief over individual tragedies and systemic horrors.  But there needs to be somewhere behind that the faith in God who raises the dead and gives each one his or her due, so that we can engage without bitterness and frenzy.

6.  Life is a gift.  It is all too easy to present life as a burden - and then say that you have to carry it anyway, because hey, we're pro-life.  Life is a gift.  There should be joy in being pro-life, joy in honouring the greatest thing the Creator has made, joy in the fact that Christ came that we might have life, and life to the full.  The Christian pro-life position is full of gratitude, seeing goodness where nobody else can see it, the joy of glimpsing the imago dei even in the briefest flickers of human existence and the hardest moments of human being.  Tone matters, because it betrays what is really going on in our hearts.

Life and death

"Choosing the time you die is a human right."

That is according to the partner of a healthy 75 year old who recently decided to end her own life rather than face the "indignity" of ageing.  The story is, from my perspective, desperately sad - but it makes complete sense.  If life is my possession, then I can give it up when I choose.  If I have a right to life based on nothing more than my own individuality, then I surely have a right to die.

This morning, as most mornings, I said Morning Prayer, and as usual prayed: "as we rejoice in the gift of this new day..."  Today is a gift.  My life today is a gift.  But that can only be true and meaningful if there is a Giver, and if he is good.  Even a good day is only a gift if it is generously given by Someone.  And a bad day - the sorts of days which presumably Gill Pharaoh was imagining when she chose to die rather than to live through them - could only be a gift if it came from a Giver who was able to take our suffering and do something positive with it.  And of course one day we will die, and that day of my death could only be a gift - a day I could rejoice in receiving - if it came from the hand of a Giver who was able to redeem even death.

In other words, if and only if the gospel is true - if Jesus died and rose - then life is a gift, every day is a gift, and nobody has a right to choose to die (though they certainly do, following Jesus, have the 'right' to give up life for another or for Christ - but that is a different thing).

It strikes me also that the gospel has something to say about the supposed indignity of old age.  Wherein is the indignity felt to lie?  Ms Pharaoh said "I simply do not want to follow this natural deterioration through to the last stage when I may be requiring a lot of help."  Is there any inherent indignity in requiring a lot of help?  I think I know what she meant; it is not a nice thought that one day I might be reliant on others for basic functions like toileting and eating.  But the gospel does tell me that my dignity as a human being, far from being contradicted by my need for 'a lot of help', derives from being helped.  I am a person Jesus died to help.  I am utterly, utterly dependent on him for everything - and existing in that relationship of dependence is what being really human means.

All in all, I am struck by the contrast between a culture where life is a random eruption from a sphere of death, and can collapse into that sphere again at a whim, and the gospel, where life is a gift to be treasured because it can be fulfilled in Christ.  And I am reminded that my only comfort, in life and death, is that I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.

Nothing is wasted

I believe that nothing is wasted.

I believe that there is not a moment in my life that will not ultimately be gathered up by my good Lord Jesus and made part of a whole.  I believe that every minute of every day - the good times, the bad times, and the thoroughly mundane times - will be collected up by him.  Like a mosaic, he will arrange the broken fragments of life, light and dark, large piece and small, and one day I will stand before him and see myself as he sees me.  And in that day I will know - what it was all about.  I will be able to look at that mosaic and say 'so that is who I am!  I never knew myself before'.  And the glory of it will be that in every detail of that mosaic I will see not only myself but him.

I believe that there is not a single life that is wasted, but all of us are contributing something unique to the wider tapestry of God's story.  I believe that everyone - yes, even the wicked - is contributing to that great artwork which we call history, and which God calls redemption.  Each of us, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, will show the glory of Christ.

I believe it.

Fact and Value

I suspect that there's very little in ethical debate that is more important than sorting out where we are making decisions about matters of fact and where we are making decisions about matters of value. Not making this distinction, and not carefully analysing whether our disagreements fall into one category or the other, leads to us talking past one another, thinking ill of one another and also just being muddle-headed.

A question of fact is a question about what is (or is not). An example of a question of fact would be 'there is such a thing as ice-cream'. This particular fact is trivial, and easy to prove, but not all questions of fact have those characteristics. The statement 'there is such a person as God' is certainly not trivial, and is not readily proved to most people's satisfaction, but it is still a question about what is - a question of fact.

A question of value is a question about what something is worth. An example might be 'ice-cream is tasty'. Again, this value statement is trivial. But the statement 'God deserves to be worshipped' is not, and neither is the statement 'murdering human beings is wrong'. These are significant statements, but they are not statements about what is. They are to do with value.

It would be easy to suppose that this distinction is identical to the distinction between what is objective and what is subjective: facts are things that are absolutely true (or false), whilst values are essentially opinion. This may well be true on a naturalistic worldview; it is not true on a Christian worldview, where God gives values which are, from a human standpoint at least, objective and universal. In a naturalistic worldview, you can be wrong about facts, but not really about values; the same does not ring true for the Christian (although obviously some value judgements really are just subjective, like my ice-cream example). This is interesting, because it means that interpreting value statements will ultimately boil down to a fact question: does God exist? But all this by the by...

Getting the fact and value distinction wrong has tainted the abortion debate in the US, I think, and I want us to get it clear on this side of the pond. In this debate, you have two sides: the 'pro-life' people, who think abortion is wrong, and the 'pro-choice' people, who think people should be able to choose. Just so you know, I'm firmly with the pro-lifers. Pro-life people often think that pro-choice people are making a value judgement: perhaps 'a woman's right to choose is more important than an infant's life', or more starkly 'it is not wrong to murder a baby'. Of course nothing could be further from the truth, and we need to drop that sort of rhetoric. The disagreement is one of fact, not value. Nobody thinks it's okay to kill a baby. Some people think that the foetus is not a baby - and that is a question of fact, not value. So the argument needs to proceed on factual questions: is this a baby, or not? Is this human or not?

This is important because often we agree on the value judgement: a human being must not be killed simply because that being's existence is inconvenient or even tragic for another human being. Let us take that as settled. (Though I cannot see why a naturalist should think so, I am grateful for the common grace that gives most people this intuition). Now we can have a sensible discussion about what a human being is, apart from emotive value-language. This won't make the discussion easy - after all, many religious pro-lifers will take their position from revelation to some extent. But I think it is a discussion that can be had.

I also appeal to pro-choice people to understand what is going on here. We disagree with you about facts. That means that we can't adopt a "live and let live" approach (to coin a phrase in a horribly ironic manner) to this issue. We really think that people are being killed, legally, at the point of their greatest defencelessness. If you thought that was the case, wouldn't you do anything in your power to stop it?