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Wesley

Today is the anniversary of the conversion of John Wesley, perhaps the only conversion marked by a memorial on a London plaza (in Aldersgate Street, above). There I joined Methodists as they lay a memorial wreath and sang from this Wesley hymn that seem to me to be an apt end to a Sabbatical;

I want an even strong desire,
I want a calmly fervent zeal,
To save poor souls out of the fire,
To snatch them from the verge of hell,
And turn them to a pardoning God,
And quench the brands in Jesus’ blood.

I would the precious time redeem,
And longer live for this alone,
To spend and to be spent for them
Who have not yet my Savior known;
Fully on these my mission prove,
And only breathe, to breathe Thy love.

My talents, gifts, and graces, Lord,
Into Thy blessed hands receive;
And let me live to preach Thy Word,
And let me to Thy glory live;
My every sacred moment spend
In publishing the sinner’s Friend.

Enlarge, inflame, and fill my heart
With boundless charity divine,
So shall I all strength exert,
And love them with a zeal like Thine,
And lead them to Thy open side,
The sheep for whom the Shepherd died

Norway

There are plenty of reasons for the British to be envious of the Norwegians. The kind of landscapes that we travel to the corners of our island to see are found everywhere in Norway. When it comes to Oslo, the capital city, you have on the face of it an orderly, clean city typical of Scandinavia yet with the added attraction that it is based in a pretty fjord of its own. So the view from one side of the City square (think Trafalgar Square in London perhaps) is this:

That it is a fantastic land is not very surprising because Norway is also one of the richest countries in the world, courtesy of oil wealth and a sensible attitude to saving it. You should probably stop reading now if you are in the USA or especially the UK - Norway has a national debt of (wait for it) nil. That is, it doesn't have a national debt.

And it gets better (worse if you're looking from the UK): Norway also has - and expects to continue to have even this year - a budget surplus of 11%. Got that? It takes in 11 % more money than it needs as a nation and has no debt. Americans and Britons alike will never live to see the day when that is true of their nations. Indeed the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund is one of the world's largest - possibly second largest - and yet the nation has less than 5 million people.

So what interested me most about my recent visit to Norway, apart from trying to keep my eyes from watering at the prices of everything, was that there is another story. Being on Sabbatical, I was not there to ferry across fjords, even if I could afford it. Rather, it was to taste the Christian ministries and their settings.

And out of those visits came these kind of pictures. One taken from the doorstep of an Oslo Church after the man who had been there for me had left for his next appointment.

Another taken from round the corner of a Baptist Church in as seedy a city street as you would find anywhere.

They won't make it on to the 'Visit Norway' website. But, if you imagine the scenes and add in some menacing groups of people hanging around (whose pictures I felt would best not be taken!) you will be reassured that humanity can make a mess of things in the face of even the greatest natural and national advantages.

And these were the places that Christ's people were ministering. Even if the sordid streets were a shock, that God's people were there serving was not a surprise!

Expenses

Passing this notice outside the parish church of the House of Commons I couldn't help thinking that its communicants, given recent revelations, should have been able to find imaginative ways of raising the necessary funds . . .

Truth

Can anything be bigger than God?

At first glance this appears to be an unacceptable question. God must be unimaginably greater than anything.

Than anything except truth.

For if, as the naturalistic atheists maintain, the truth is that there is no God that truth is greater than God. God cannot be greater than the truth.

The theory of evolution is sometimes set out as that ultimate truth that dispenses with God or gods. Galileo is often cited.

On discovering, in 1604, a supernova and having previously spotted sunspots the prevailing truth of the academic day - that of Aristotle - seemed to be untrue. Both academics and the Church authoriies of the day resisted his apparent heresy to maintain their truth that was not, in truth, true.

Today, claim the Neo-Darwinists, we have the same situation. The truth is that a natural process made everything. This truth makes God redundant and those who believe in God(s) are deluded.

Well, we've seen that the evidence points exactly the opposite way. Information - that is, an outside agency - is scientifically necessary to make a beginning. But then there are those monkeys. Remember them? The ones that type randomly trying to produce a work of Shakespeare. It cannot be done in the available time and space.

So how, on this theory, did the processes make the complexity of the world we find ourselves in? "Ah, " says Richard Dawkins et al., "You see when a monkey types the right letter, it is compared with the target letter and if correct, he stops". The monkey eventually hits 'W' and, matching the first word of the play, holds it right there to set off the writing of Hamlet. The monkey knows his job is done. In this way the impossible mountain of complexity is scaleable.

For all his protestations, Richard Dawkins does not believe in a Blind Watchmaker at all. He has to believe - because his logical mind shows him the truth - that there is a script on to which Darwin's theoretical randomness is being written.

Richard, who wrote the script? "Ridiculous," says Dawkins. "If you're going to say God is forever and beyond time and the mega-playwrght you might as well say that DNA is, or a spaghetti monster". Except we know for sure - he knows for sure - that DNA is not for ever and outside of time, and nobody actually professes to know a spaghetti monster which, anyway, presupposes a prior spaghetti maker. On the other hand, God is the plausible explanation of all necessary outside agency.

The Bible - and God - do not claim to be above the truth. They cannot be. Rather, the Lord Jesus taught that he is the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Word and Person of God are the most important aspect of the truth, and the part which if neglected leaves humanity's largest hole.

Dawkins

The side blurb on this blog mentions my anti-hero is Richard Dawkins (though I also share his desire to tell the truth as I understand it)

I should say that by anti-hero I do not have anything against Professor Dawkins personally but that his attacks on my Lord make him someone I least admire. You can hear the man himself on this link at the BBC

Listen out for his answer, if you can call it that, to the question "What's the point?". Compare his answer to that of the apostle Paul,

For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain

I think, in his supposed quest for truth, if he thinks 'there's no less of a point if he doesn't believe in God than if he did' I fear he's missed a trick there.

Beginning

Genesis 1:1 in the original Hebrew reads;

(At/In the) beginning created/filled God[Elohim] the heavens/skies and the earth.

Like most Hebrew translations there is, as you can see a different order and several alternatives. Who'd be a translator!? My point however is the simplest and first word of all. Beginning.

For millennia this was taken as insignificant compared to the next two words 'created' and 'God'. However, it turns out to be as important a word as any in the Scriptures. Why? Because in ongoing scientific discovery it has finally become inevitable that the planet and indeed the universe had a beginning. Previously this could only be assumed (or revealed!).

The significance of this can be seen in observation of Professor Stephen Hawking,
Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.

John Maddox, former editor of Nature magazine bewailed the idea of a beginning because it gave creationists 'ample justification for their beliefs.'

But you do not need to be a supposedly clever person to know that if there once was nothing and now there is something, then the secret isn't a selection process but an intervention.

And the question then becomes, whodunnit?

Lennox

Without doubt two of my Sabbatical highlights were listening to a sermon and, on another day, a lecture by John Lennox. He is a Mathematics Professor at Oxford University and applies his knowledge of things like algorithmic incompressibility and other less-than-everyday categories to the Science and Religion issues raised by the likes of his fellow-Professor Dawkins.

He convincingly shows that DNA, by its very complexity and randomness, makes natural selection impossible as an explanation of humans (and a lot else). In a famous experiment monkeys were given the chance to produce a Shakespeare Play. The real monkeys were markedly and hilariously unsuccessful.

Some more imaginery monkeys were put to the task in the form of a computer programme, randomly producing letters and yet their infinite energy and concentration is also doomed to fail.

No, science shows what every believer knows; that there is more to us than natural selection. This extra to natural selection might, in the neutral sense, be described as 'information'. To be fair, Richard Dawkins concedes the need for this himself. In another blog, with John Lennox's help, we can deal with his unbelievable answer to the problem. Meanwhile, here's a clue to the right answer:

Church

If a Sabbatical does anything to a Pastor, it de-Churches him. In a life tied up with a local community of believers it is always possible for him to incrementally mistake the Church for the message or the organisation for the essence of faith. As people, in a sense rightly and in another sense catastrophically wrongly, expect their Leaders to be the guardians of policies, politics and programmes so the normal week becomes occupied by preoccupations.

The Church as people is sacrificially loved by God. The Church as a constituted charitable organisation always stands in danger of becoming not just irrelevant to God but the enemy of His kingdom.

Perhaps the low point of my Sabbatical came when I attended Evening Prayer in the late afternoon at one of Britain's ancient Cathedrals. It was a very pleasant spring Sunday afternoon. The Cathedral had had early and mid-morning Eucharists. This was the third and only other service of the day.

The verger showed me to a seat in the choir - I wasn't expecting many attendees and neither was he. Behind me sat the Canon. A Clergywoman stood at the back togging up. Another member of the Cathedral clergy sat opposite, talking to what I took to be a key member of the Chapter who spoke of resigning over ill health.

The verger took his seat. The Clergywoman walked forward and read through the service. and the other four of us sat, stood or knelt as appropriate.

Concerning which I reflected that the whole voluntary congregation at that service appeared to be Baptist Ministers - or more specifically, me! The other four probably had to be there by rota. Though I might have felt intimidated by being clerically outnumbered I needn't have worried as they gathered afterwards to complain about some upcoming meeting and did not speak to me at all.

Does such an experience make me doubt my faith? Despair of the Church? Absolutely not. It just reminds me that the Church is living stones not ancient stones. Which is somewhat the point of the conversation below;