The Doubting Believer 2 - Ecclesiastes

I
Well: we are all still here.

According to Harold Camping and his followers, this certainly shouldn’t be. When he fronted the media on Sunday morning the 89 year old evangelist was reportedly ‘flabbergasted’ that the rapture had not occurred on 21st May as he had predicted.

Never mind that this one of the issues that Scripture quite clearly states is (to use the words of that eminent theologian Donald Rumsfeld) a ‘known unknown’. The declaration of a timetable for the end times evidently touches a need that people have for certainty about these matters.
It was only two weeks ago that I was in Strumica in rural Macedonia of all places and I saw the missionaries of 21st May handing out leaflets on the street. It made me angry: in a land where the evangelical churches cling to some kind of legitimacy by the skin of their teeth, this was the crazy face of evangelicalism that was being presented to their neighbours. So I leaned out the window of the car when we were stopped and the lights and said to one of them ‘hey, Jesus says ‘no-one knows the day or the hour!’ doesn’t he?’ But the guy was ready for this one: and he said ‘Yes but in Ecclesiastes it says…’ and I couldn’t hear the rest because our car moved on.

I would have been fascinated to hear where the 21st May appears in Ecclesiastes, of course, but I am still wondering, and Harold Camping isn’t returning my calls at the moment.
The 21st May crew are easy enough to ridicule. But their persuasive power, such as it is, lies in tapping into a feeling that is widespread – a feeling that we probably ought to own up to. And that feeling is, I think, best characterised as a disappointment and a frustration with the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Basically, we just want more certainty than we have been given. We know that, as James says, ‘the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind’. And yet, we cannot, we do not, have a knowledge of everything we would wish to know about. This leaves us – well, where does this leave us? Feeling insecure perhaps – or at least, with an insecurity that we seek to fill with certainties. We would like to know because a little extra knowledge would surely anchor our faith more securely against the winds of doubt that come blowing through from time to time.
Are we believers no better off, then, than our anxious unbelieving neighbours? Without belief in a personal God, the unbeliever has to reckon with whatever blind forces control the universe, a prospect that many people evidently find terrifying. The great Australian novelist David Malouf writes:

What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal – they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them – cannot put a face to them, cannot find in them anything we recognise as human – we cannot deal with them. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.

Are Christians in a better position than this? And if so: why do we have so few clear answers to our most difficult questions? Isn’t the Bible the answer book to all life’s problems, the road map to life, the solution to all our difficulties? Why has there been such a delay between Jesus’ first and second coming? Why does a loving and powerful God permit terrible tsunamis to sweep away small children? Why don’t people respond to the gospel if it is so evidently the truth?
These are all legitimate and profound questions for which there are no easy answers or cheap shortcuts. In fact, if they don’t trouble us, then I think we haven’t really been reading Scripture all that closely. There is in Biblical faith, I would like to suggest, a right doubting. There is an appropriate reticence to it, a reluctance to say more than it rightly knows. Christian theology, it turns out, is about learning to say ‘I don’t know’ as much as it is about saying with confidence ‘I know’.

And the important lesson of this right doubting is that we don’t alleviate the uncertainty we feel by creating false certainties. Rather, our faith is strengthened, amidst the turbulence of this world, by fixing our gaze more closely on the object of our faith.

II
Strange as it may seem for the May 21st guy, Ecclesiastes is exactly where I want to begin this second exposition on the theme of doubt, in chapter 11. I want to look at this text because the Teacher in Ecclesiastes illustrates the kind of ‘right doubting’ I am talking about.

The teacher is wisely aware of the limits of human wisdom when it comes to the world. As he says in 8:7, about the future:
Since no one knows the future,
who can tell someone else what is to come?

And in 8:16-17 he says he is sceptical about human claims to know everything:
When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man’s labor on earth—his eyes not seeing sleep day or night— then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.

But when we get to chapter 11 we find that the lack of understanding of all things is also a lack of knowledge of God’s ways. The first two verses sound quite fatalistic, as if they are asking to accept some karmic principle:
1 Cast your bread upon the waters,
for after many days you will find it again.
2 Give portions to seven, yes to eight,
for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land

It’s investment advice that protects you from an unknown future – from the next GFC that comes along. ‘Cast your bread upon the waters’ sounds a bit like feeding ducks. Perhaps the NNIV clears it up for us by translating this verse as ‘Ship your grain across the waters’ – whatever the case, it stands as a kind of advice to trust the forces that undergird the world – ‘you never know what may occur if you invest yourself’. If that seems almost naïve, vs 2 offers the more pessimistic version: you need to forestall the coming of disaster by investing yourself across a broad portfolio – by ‘giving portions to seven, yes to eight’.

There is a pattern and an order to the way the world works, but the totality of it is concealed from human eyes and beyond human knowing. Observe the patterns:
3 If clouds are full of water,
they pour rain upon the earth.
Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north,
in the place where it falls, there will it lie.

These are almost truisms, aren’t they? If a tree falls, that’s where it lies; if clouds are full, they will wet the ground. The natural world has a rhythm and an order that does allow us to predict it to some extent.

But if you are caught gaping at the world trying to predict it and to outwit it, you will never plant your crops or gather them in (vs 4):
Whoever watches the wind will not plant;
whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.

It seems that the teacher is giving us something with one hand, and taking it away with the other. There is definitely an order to things, so you can act according to some kind of regularity and pattern; but there is also a sense in which the whole picture is ever concealed from human beings, and so we can do nothing more than secure ourselves against the unknown and unpredictable.

Which leads us to the verse that seems to provide a key to the others, vs 5:
As you do not know the path of the wind,
or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb,
so you cannot understand the work of God,
the Maker of all things.

It is not just that we cannot see the totality of the order of the things, though we can see that there is order and rhythm; it is not just that we cannot know the future. It is that we are profoundly ignorant of the work of God, the Maker of all things. We cannot understand him. Our ignorance of the workings of the natural world – of the path of the wind and of the formation of babies – is but an illustration of our ignorance of the workings of God.

Now it is worth just pausing a moment here, because as modern people we might actually and validly say wait a minute: isn’t it actually the case that we now can trace the path of the wind and that we do know how a baby is formed in its mother’s womb? Haven’t the bounds of ignorance been beaten back by the advance of science. And if that is the case, does the analogy hold up? Hasn’t this attitude of ‘there are some things we’ll never know’ been discredited by the power of investigation and theory? And if this is the case: can’t we also say that the possibility that we might ‘know the mind of God’ is ever closer?

Of course the analogy our other draws here is taken from the world of his own experience, where winds and births were untraceable. I don’t think there is anything in his writing or in the wisdom literature more widely that would prohibit proper human investigation of the created world. In fact, the presumption of order that he works with proved to be the foundation of scientific discovery in the seventeenth century and beyond. But the principle that he outlines here is still true: because there is not merely a force or a system at the heart of the universe but a Creator, human beings will only ever know things as parts of a whole.

In fact, our author is saying, God reveals himself and declares himself maker and judge of all things. But that does not give us access to his inner workings, to peer at his notebooks or to trawl through his hard drive. So he tells us:
Sow your seed in the morning,
and at evening let not your hands be idle,
for you do not know which will succeed,
whether this or that,
or whether both will do equally well.

There is no option for human beings but to do what they can – to work hard, given that we can’t predict the future.

How is this different from the despairing anxiety of our neighbours – the kind of view of fate that leads them down to the club to put their Centrelink payments through the pokies?
The teacher is not a fatalist – and this is vital to what he wants to teach us. He knows what he knows, and he knows what he doesn’t know. He knows that God has the measure of all things, and that God will judge. As he says in 11:9:
Be happy, young man, while you are young,
and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.
Follow the ways of your heart
and whatever your eyes see,
but know that for all these things
God will bring you to judgment.

And in 12:14:
God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.

This is a doctrine of providence, in other words. We do not have total knowledge of the ways of God. We cannot from our perspective ever successfully calculate the way in which the hand of God will direct the future - of our own lives, let alone the planet’s.

But what we do have from Qoheleth the teacher is the knowledge that all things are in the hands of a God who brings things to their proper account. We do not know the plan; but we know that there is a plan – and that the plan belongs to the God whose divine nature and eternal qualities are on display all around us; and whose determination to save for himself a people echoes down history.

III
And that is perhaps where we need to modify what we have said about our knowledge this morning. For indeed we have been presented with a powerful revelation of God’s nature and his purposes in the coming of the Son – the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his being. We have in Christ the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past (as Paul calls it in Romans); Paul prays for the Colossians to ‘have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God’; and that they be ‘filled with the knowledge of God’s will’.

This mystery? It is the gospel of Jesus Christ – which is the revelation of God’s plan for all things from before the foundation of the world. We are privileged beyond even the angels, as Peter says. We stand in a place that the patriarchs and all the prophets could only dream about.
And what is it that we now know? The mystery is that the judgement of the judging God is not merely a balancing of the scales or a bringing of everything to account, but a great act of grace and mercy. The righteousness of God, from God, is revealed to us in the gospel of Jesus Christ who died for sin, so that God could be just and be the one who justifies the ungodly. It is in him that his reign over all things is established and in him that lies the future of all things.

But what we have here is and isn’t. It is decisive knowledge. The most vital thing to know about living on earth has been revealed to us. The deepest truth of all truths, the mystery of all mysteries, has been written in the sky for us – not as some arcane secret that you can only know if you swear on your mother’s grave by the light of a full moon, or that you can only know if you are inducted into the highest level of our club. We know this mystery because it has been exposed to the full light of day – the greatest Wikileak of all time.

But notice what this knowledge is not. It is not comprehensive knowledge. It is not knowledge of the movement of the planets or of the paths of electrons or of how the mysterious patterns of the DNA code combine to form our individuality. It is knowledge of the destiny of all things but it is not knowledge of the future. It is not even really an answer to the problem of evil – why does God do it that way? The knowledge given to us by faith in the gospel is not the removal of all uncertainty or the answer to all our questions.

Paul – even the Paul who could talk about the revelation of the knowledge of God’s will, even he, the apostle to whom had been given a special, unique experience of Jesus Christ, even he drew back from explaining all the ways of God. In Romans 9-11 we see him wrestling with the mystery of Israel’s hardenness of heart. Why would God do that? When he reaches the end of his discussion he throws up his hands and delivers this extraordinary sequence (Romans 11:33-36):
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!
"Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?"
"Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?"
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.

Even we who have the knowledge of God’s will in Jesus Christ cannot presume to know the particular plans of God, what the theologians call the ‘secret will’ of God. Outside of Christ we cannot declare that this or that is his will, or not. We cannot predict what may happen. We cannot explain the inner workings of providence. We cannot explain history. In fact, to attempt to do so is a kind of blasphemy. If we could explain God in this way, or know his mind, he would not be truly God.

But notice how this lack of certainty does not leave Paul in an anxious state – just as it did not concern the Teacher. Like our secular contemporaries, we believe we are in the grip of a power that is beyond our control. But unlike them, we are not in the grip of an anxiety of unknowing. The difference is that we know the crucial piece of information: we know what this power is like. We know that in ‘all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose’.

The gospel, even the gospel, does not remove all uncertainty from us. And so it is right that we express bewilderment when we are bewildered. It is right that we say ‘I don’t know’ when we actually don’t. In fact, it is a grave temptation that Christians face to say too much – to try to explain everything. It is a temptation to which Christians have frequently succumbed with embarrassing or devastating results, as church history will tell us.

We feel this particularly acutely at moments of great crisis: when the medical diagnosis is not what we had prayed for, or when the earth moves under our feet, or when we are overwhelmed by the flood: what can we say? How can we explain the plans of God? What can the plan of God be in such moments? How can I really have confidence in God when there is so much that is unknown to me? How long, O Lord? I know for some of us here those moments of bewilderment are very real and very immediate.

But the Scriptural response to these doubting moments is not to resort to cheaply won answers; just as it is not to wallow in despair. Rather, our focus is drawn to what God himself has done, and to things he has revealed. The ground of Paul’s confidence is not in an explanation for everything that removes all doubt, but the knowledge that God has revealed the true righteousness of his purposes in just and merciful gospel of his Son. So his counsel to those in the grip of terrible affliction is this (2 Cor 4:17-18):
…our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

Body and Soul

Here's my piece on body and soul.

The art of godly church politics

Can church politics be played Christianly? We cannot have any truck with the holy height from which some direct their sneers at the business of church politics. Politics is just a reality of the polis: of the city of God as much as the city of man. Authority and power are not of themselves tainted, but given to be exercised with due judgement. As in the state, so in the church: human judgements are imperfect. Their imperfectability does not make them any less necessary. Calling the arrangement and distribution of power and authority in the church ‘politics’ allows us to notice the humanity of the process and so to reckon with its fallibility. The most dangerous and tyrannical regimes in the church arise when the existence of politics is denied and the exercise of power is coated with pious language. The piety of ‘comprehensiveness’ is oftentimes used in this way with world-wide Anglicanism. It gives the appearance of disinterest and balance and conceals the interests that it really serves.

There ought to be no embarrassment then at the existence of a group like the Anglican Church League. They can and have played their part in the good operation of the fellowship of churches in Sydney. They have often done the hard work of convincing people they need to be involved in diocesan affairs in order to ensure its proper, open and effective management. Whereas in other dioceses power congeals in a mysterious way around the bishop, encouraging active participation in the political workings of the Sydney diocese aids in the distribution of power and the involvement of the laity.

Even conceding that politics is a necessity within denominational structures, it is imperative that those who engage in such a process act in such a way that the name of Jesus Christ is honoured. How could this be done? I offer seven principles as a beginning. First: a godly church politics proceeds on the basis that the quality of the means matter more than the delivery of the ends. It refuses to accept the ‘whatever it takes’ mentality of politics in the secular sphere. This is because church politicians ought to recognise the sovereignty of God in practice as well as in theory. The Christian life itself is not about managing outcomes, but about conducting oneself in a manner that testifies to the God in whose hand those outcomes lie. The principles for conducting church politics can surely not differ markedly from this. This principle relates especially to a view of time. Christians understand time itself as being in God’s hands, and so are not concerned when a certain decision takes decades to get right. I have heard people complain: ‘we’ve been discussing this issue since the 1970s!’. To which I feel like replying: ‘Is that all?’ The Anglo-American apologist Os Guiness writes:
Means either serve our ends or subvert our... ends. I often hear the little phrase, "Whatever it takes . . ." The pragmatic comes before the principled and that is always counter-productive. Principled ways of doing things are more effective in the long run. They are not only right. They are wise.

Second, sanctified Christians are still weak and still sin, and so godly politics ought to pursue mutual accountability as a matter of priority. The trouble with having a great cause is that it is too easy to imagine that the sanctity of the cause transfers onto those who share in it. The child abuse scandals in churches across the denominational divides have spread because of this naivety. But a properly Biblical theology of sin recognises that Christians still share in the weakness of the flesh. Article XIX of the Thirty-Nine Articles is quite clear on this:
And this infection of nature doth remain, yea, in them that are regenerated, whereby the lust of the flesh…is not subject to the law of God.

Proceeding on the basis that everyone ought to be answerable takes a good deal of effort and slows down the process. But people become addicted to power like they become addicted to pornography; and the consequences can be just as devastating, even when there is no malevolence of intent. In practice, this means ensuring for example that the same people aren’t serving on committees at several levels of the church’s administration. I would urge the synod to consider limiting the terms that people can serve on diocesan committees - including and especially the Standing Committee - to nine years, unless they have an ex officio position. Introducing new faces to the system would increase the health of the system by increasing accountability and access.

Third, a godly church politics ought to seek the inclusion of women as well as men, and the young as well as the old. The worldly tendency is for denominational structures to be dominated by older laymen and the predominantly male clergy who have a professional interest. The process becomes profoundly alienating to women simply by dint of their reduced numbers. And yet even evangelicals with a complementarian view of gender relations do not have a hierarchical view of Christian fellowship. By not reflecting its own diversity of membership in these decision-making bodies, the denomination is only operating on half its cylinder power. The response to this is not tokenism or the introduction of quotas, but rather a determination to change among those who operate with the church-political sphere.

Fourth, a godly church politics should seek to make structures and processes accessible to those who are disadvantaged by: lack of mates, lack of legal knowledge, lack of rhetorical skill, or ethnic background. The elaborate legal structures and procedures of the synodical process in Sydney are legendary. I have spoken with intelligent professionals who have been on the synod for a number of years and who still feel completely alienated by the process. It may not be possible to simplify the process itself. But the unwieldy process clearly disadvantages those who have to engage with it but do not understand it. What’s more, the process disadvantages those who are alienated from the clusters of friendships that have naturally developed over many years.

Fifth, a godly church politics ought to seek to overcome the paradigm of winners and losers. The system is set up, like most democratic and legal structures, to promote adversarialism. Synods of several hundred people can only express themselves by saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – and inevitably more people will say one as opposed to the other. Christians ought to be able to see themselves and their fellowship as not governed by or framed by such a process, however. But the adversarial process produces wounds in the losers that take years to heal if at all. It also promotes in the victors a vulgar triumphalism - that those who opposed this or that decision are suspect, or disloyal. But the political process isn’t the basis for our union – Christ is. In the end I think the remedy for this ongoing problem is that the denominational fellowship needs to find other ways to express itself – perhaps by the institution of a separate conference or event.

Sixth, a godly church politics ought to prioritise persuasion over results. It would be possible, with sufficient numbers, simply to steamroll the synodical process with only a token amount of debate and airing of views. One synod member has spoken to me of the feeling that decisions are all pre-fabricated before the synod actually meets, meaning that most of the members actually have no real input into the decision. The trouble with having a single party like the ACL so dominant is that the real decision-making is in effect reserved for those who have access to the ACL – and the ACL is far less accountable and open than the synod is. The ACL and other active church politicians ought to have as a priority the need to facilitate open discussion of the important issues before the synod in such a way that all synod members can have input into them. The gospel itself is a gospel of persuasion, no coercion; this ought to be reflected in the manner in which we conduct our church politics.

Seventh, a godly church politics ought to beware the temptation to use spiritual language as an instrument of coercion. Spiritualised and quasi-pious language can be used as a means to silence dissent or to manipulate the church political process. By calling the decisions of synodical governments ‘Spirit-led’ in effect bludgeons those who disagreed with by implying that they countered the Spirit. Interestingly, it was through the Spirit in Acts 21:4 that the Tyrean disciples urged Paul not to go to Jerusalem – something he felt his divine calling had compelled him to do – which is to say, the Spirit may come down on both sides of a question! ‘Speaking the truth in love’, from Ephesians 4:15, has become code for ‘if I speak what I think is the truth, however bluntly, then it will by definition be loving’.

The Doubting Believer I - Abram & Sarai

I The Doubting Believer

Perhaps to our contemporaries doubting seems more authentic than believing. There’s a certain credibility to being a doubter; an apparent courage and honesty to scepticism with its brave face set towards the unknown.

But it strikes me that doubt is an often unacknowledged state of life among Christian believers and that it can be a matter for despair and even shame. It strikes me also that, for many students, College itself can be a place in which doubts arise with a force that completely knocks us off balance. It was certainly my experience that this was the case.

There are many Christians carrying on a silent struggle with doubt. In fact, there are many Christian leaders wrestling with doubt. Often, we find it difficult to share this with others. Sometimes this is because the nature of the doubt itself is hard to articulate. But mostly, this is because in a community which is supposed to be a believing community – that’s its very identity – to admit to doubt is to strike at the very core of what the community is. So, there is an element of shame associated with having doubts. There’s the feeling that I’ll be letting people down if I acknowledge these uncertainties.

The shame prevents us from being honest about our doubts, and so people are isolated in them. But worse – the Christian community still operates with a definition of doubt that is chiefly intellectual. Doubts must be, the thinking goes, problems with the propositions of the Christian faith. I am struggling, we imagine the doubter saying, with believing in the virgin birth. And so our remedies for the problems of doubt are chiefly intellectual. Trouble believing in the resurrection? Well, here is some more proof that it occurred. Doubts about the Bible? Here’s an article to read proving it is the word of God.

Doubt is a complex condition that involves a mixture of intellectual difficulties, existential and personal problems, and the possibility of sin. There is not then a straightforward and simple cure for doubt.

But like suffering, doubt is an experience that Holy Scripture knows. The Word of God itself acknowledges that it is a word that will be doubted as well as believed – and indeed that it will be doubted by those who also believe it.

And so we are well advised, I think, to drop some soundings into the pages of Scripture in our quest to understand doubt and how to live with and through it. And so my intention is to engage with three Biblical characters who doubt: today, Abram and his wife Sarai in Genesis 16; next week, the Teacher in Ecclesiastes 11; and lastly, Thomas Didymus, the doubter, in John 20.

II Impatient doubt

Our first doubter, is Abraham - or rather our first doubters are Abram and his wife, Sarai, for they are certainly in it together.

At the point at which I want to dip into his story, in Genesis 16, we find that Abram and Sarai are still childless. And the strain is starting to tell:

Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; so she said to Abram, "The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her." Abram agreed to what Sarai said.

Childlessness is of itself heart-breaking enough. But in these circumstances the disappointment and frustration must have been acute. Why? At seventy-five years old, Abram was not interested in moving to the Gold Coast and playing a few rounds of golf. He had sold up and moved everything had to a hostile territory.

And of course it was all on the basis of the word of God that came to him as we have it reported for us in Genesis 12:1-3: the promise of a land, a people and the protection of a blessing. Now ten years on, they have very little to show for their investment.

And though Abram had shown faith in moving from his home in Ur, he had also shown a tendency to want to take matters into his own hands. Immediately in Genesis 12 we find him engaging in an act of self-protection, as he deceives Pharaoh about the true identity of his wife – an episode that he will astonishingly repeat in Genesis 20 with Abimelech.

In Genesis 15, Abram engages in a round of parleying with the Lord in which he demands from him more assurance that the promises are in earnest. Even as he accepts God’s word in 15:6 – that verse which is so important to our NT reading of Abraham – Abram turns around and demands from God more concrete evidence (in 15:8): O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?

And what he receives as an answer is the extraordinary drama of the making of the covenant in the gloom, with its bizarre and bloody ceremony, and its terrifying vision of the determination of the Lord himself to make God on his promises.

Isn’t that enough?

Well, no. When chapter 16 opens we discover that it has now been ten years since the move to Canaan, and for all the fiery words in the night there is still no baby. And so Sarai comes up with a plan.

It is, I think, too easy for us to write Abram and Sarai off as silly and faithless. We forget what exactly is being asked of them at this point. The promise was deeply personal, because it involved the human bodies of this aged couple. This was a matter of the nitty-gritty of human reproduction. And they must have known, as they saw their bodies fade, and weaken and slide towards death, that the likelihood of any child arriving in the course of nature was now extremely remote.

And what did they have to show for that decade of waiting? They had two words from God, and even a promise sealed in the blood of animals. But what was that worth? Was this promise empty? Anyone can make promises and seal oaths. Was in fact the case – and it must have crossed at least Sarai’s mind – that Abram had simply been deluded when he heard the voice of the Lord? And when she thought about the small print of the contract, Sarai could remember that it had specified that the heir to be expected was to be ‘a son coming from your own body’- that is, from Abram’s. No mention had been made of her as a necessary sharer in the promise. And so, her plan seems reasonable enough. Indeed, as she says ‘The Lord has kept me from having children’. If she has no children as yet, is it not that the sovereign Lord has not merely a bit slow about delivering on his promises, but is actually himself keeping her from having children? Is there not the feeling that God is being somewhat perverse in this plan?

As I said, it is too easy for us to stand over this pair of doubters and to approach them from the high moral ground. But I think the text itself doesn’t want us to be such unsympathetic readers. Scripture refuses to let us have a cheap shot at Abraham and Sarah. What God promises them is, on any reasonable account, unlikely.

And don’t we too know this kind of doubt?

We have more in common with this couple than perhaps we realise. Their doubting is characterised by impatience at God’s timing on the one hand, and bewilderment as to his methods on the other hand. It is not doubt as to God’s existence, nor even doubt as to the goodness of his final plan for things, but doubt as to his chosen methods. I don’t doubt God, but I do know the weakness of human flesh, particularly my own, though I am pretty sure of the grubbiness and weakness of other human flesh as well.

What can God mean by making such fallible and broken vessels the channels through which his plan for redemption comes to the world? It seems perfectly plausible for God to be a transcendent and independent being who is mighty to act and whose word becomes reality even as he says it. But when he gets entangled in human affairs and even binds himself to the performance of human bodies – even rather embarrassingly, in the bedroom – then it is that the realist and the pragmatist in me says, ‘couldn’t he do it better?’ It’s as if his sovereignty works in theory, but not so well in practice.

This is the strange nature of this kind of doubt – it is a doubt that actually begins with doubt of ourselves as fallen creatures and weak bodies and grows into a doubt against the God who would interact with such creatures as we are. It’s the perverse reverse of Calvin’s idea that the knowledge of ourselves goes hand in hand with the knowledge of God: doubt of ourselves as the possible instruments of God’s work in the world leads inexorably to doubt of God himself.

III Giving God a helping hand

It is not as if this doubt of God is unreasonable or idolatrous, as other forms of doubt may be. This kind of doubt is merely a preference for the possible over the impossible, for the likely over the unlikely. It is a pragmatic kind of doubt.

But the temptation that comes with this doubt is to try to secure God’s promises for him. That’s what Sarai tries to do of course by presenting the Egyptian Hagar to Abraham as his bedmate. She exchanges the impossible for the possible. At least Hagar is still ovulating, after all. Sarai gives here to Abram as a wife, not merely as concubine – there seems to be no suggestion that some kind of lustful desire in the 85 year old Abram is being quenched in the curious arrangement. But even so, the methods are questionable. We’ve seen this couple alter their marriage arrangements before, and it hasn’t been exactly honourable.

Sure enough, Hagar becomes pregnant. Is this finally a tangible result that goes beyond a mere word from God? Has Sarai’s scheme been a success?

But we see almost immediately that the outcome is miserable for all three adults. Hagar’s scorn of her mistress is met by Sarai’s mistreatment and Abram’s apathy. Though Hagar had been given to Abraham as a wife, she never stopped being a servant. Had Sarai realised the impropriety of her actions and regretted them, that she so resented Hagar even while she was carrying the precious baby?

The temptation to shorten the gap between promise and fulfilment is there for us, as well. Our impatience with God’s timing and our frustration with his methods can lead us to want to speed it all up a little. There are times when we know an outcome that God clearly wants and explicitly promises could be reached more quickly and effectively if only we were allowed to choose the methods. We could surely grow the church more quickly than it is growing if we preached the gospel as message of personal improvement. We could certainly protect our denomination from false teaching more effectively if we were able to engage in dubious political tactics in order to get the result we want. If I slander the character of a person who is an opponent of the gospel, then I protect the gospel, don’t I? If I engage in dishonest rhetoric from the pulpit so that people can believe the truth, am I not justified? Do not God’s ends justify any means? God is sovereign – but can’t I help it along a bit?

IV God’s arm will not be twisted

The irony of Sarai’s story is of course that though Hagar’s baby is not the baby of the promise to Abram, her baby becomes the recipient of his own promise. God does not allow Hagar to become the hapless victim of the schemes of Sarai. She is met by the angel of God in the wilderness and hears from him a promise that is strikingly similar to the promise Sarai hoped her offspring would receive:

"I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count." (Gen 16:10)

But she has not gained Abram and Sarai’s promise. This man, ‘a wild donkey of a man’ will not be the nation through whom all nations are blessed. Quite the opposite: he will live in hostility to his brothers. He stands as a sign that the history of Abram and Sarai’s children will be filled with conflict and struggle before the plan of God is complete.

What the narrator ensures that we see is that God’s promising is not thwarted by Sarai’s attempt to hi-jack it. The baby Ishmael, who looks like he is a jigsaw piece from another puzzle that just won’t fit in easily anywhere, is in fact the vehicle for God’s work, but in a new way. God will not be trapped by the letter of his promises, it turns out. His arm cannot be so easily twisted. But at the same time, Ishmael is still the son of Abraham and Sarah, and God has not forgotten him.

We cannot create the conditions under which God will act. He is not like Baal, whose prophets thought they needed to cajole him into action by dancing and cutting themselves. We long for revival to come to this city and to our nation, don’t we? Has not God promised that his word will not return to him empty? Can we not create the conditions under which God must surely appear in mighty salvation? If we held more all-night prayer vigils, would we surely not unleash him to do miracles? God is not a latent power that we can use like a spell. And yet that does not make him weak, or untrue to his own word. It is just that his word is not beholden to ours’. We should be less surprised that God is so surprising. And perhaps this is the path out of our doubt about his readiness to act and about his curious methods: would a God we could so easily predict be God? As Paul explains it in 1 Corinthians 1-3, the gospel of Jesus Christ just does not conform to human expectations about how divinity should act.

It turned out that for Abram and Sarai, God was waiting until the most impossible moment before he would deliver on his promise. Both Abraham and Sarah in turn would laugh when they heard this promise again, knowing how old they were. There aren’t too many people in Scripture whose response to the voice of God is laughter, are there? It had got the point of comedy as far as they were concerned.

But the joke was on them. When the baby was born, he was given the name Isaac, which means ‘he laughs’, because, as Sarah would say ‘God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me’. That wasn’t to be scoffed at.

V God’s impossible possibilities

The story of Abram illustrates for us that faith is not heroic. It might seem strange that the New Testament presents doubting Abraham as an exemplar of faith. In Romans 4, his faith is offered as the great outflanking manoeuvre in the historic pattern of God’s justification of his people – he believed, and his faith was credited to him as righteousness. In Hebrews 11, he is listed in the roll call of the faithful forerunners of those who now believe.

But in being an example of faith, Abraham is not a hero of faith. Faith is not some virtue like courage which deserves credit by being righteousness. Biblical faith is a hearing of the word of God as the word of God. Now this word of God is always spoken to us in the midst of a life in which it is contested and disputed, and even flatly denied. It is a word about ninety-year old women having babies, or bedraggled slaves becoming great nations, or about the dead coming back to life. There is always with this word of God that we receive another way of looking at it. As word about the future, as a promise, it never comes to us as a completely fulfilled word. There is always a gap. And so we should not be shocked or dismayed when our questions start to fill that gap: how is God going to bring his word to pass? What is God’s plan in this bleak circumstance? Why are so few people responding to the gospel at the moment? What proof can I have of God’s commitment to his promises? This side of the end of all things, Christian faith will always be attended by these questions.

So why believe? In his shambolic way, against all hope, Abraham believed, though the evidence of his body ‘as good as dead’ contradicted the promise he heard. Why?

Because the character of God has its own inner logic. The word of God rings true to who God is as he reveals himself to us in the history of salvation. It is the evidence of what God actually does that compels us to believe. The truth that we receive when we belief is not deducible in the ordinary sense, or calculable, or even possible as we recognise it. It does not follow natural laws. But it is consistent with the miracle that there is something rather than nothing. Abraham was ‘fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised’.

There was another woman for whom pregnancy was an impossibility. Not this time because of old age or infertility, but because of her virginity. When the angel’s word came to her, she rightly asked ‘how can this be, since I am a virgin?’

The angel’s reply contained the single theological truth that we need to cling to in the face or our own sinfulness and death, and in the face of the impossibility that these can be overcome by any strategy we can devise:

Nothing is impossible with God.

Theology and the Future of Humanity - a sketch for a lecture

What will become of us? Or, what will we become? Or, lest the notion of ‘becoming’ sound too passive: what can we become? There is no doubt that the destiny of humanity is rushing up to meet us at a speed unprecedented in human history. We are closer to the future than we ever have been before. A number of meta-narratives compete to describe the future of humanity. Some are infra-historical, and describe the future of human being, in progressive terms, as moving from glory to glory. The genre of this narrative is epic, with Adam cast as the epic hero emerging triumphant from the struggle of history. Others are apocalyptic, and describe the future in terms of an often disastrous rupture with the present, usually on account of human evil or ineptitude. Adam is cast in this narrative as a tragic protagonist, victim of his own nature.

These descriptions of the future of humanity may be religious or materialist. However, in neither type of story is the other possibility adequately described. The progressivist narrative (‘epic’) cannot account for the brute historical fact of human recidivism. The apocalyptic vision (‘tragic’) is deeply misanthropic, and in denial about the remarkable achievements of human beings. Both story-types are forms of an idealism which into which the actual human experience must be squeezed without remainder – which explains why they are currently in unresolved combat.

We can illustrate this from a reading of UK author Zadie Smith’s 2000 novel White Teeth. Smith’s rich, sprawling, picaresque narrative of late twentieth century London is a telling description of life in a post-colonial Western city, where human identity is being re-shaped in the multicultural melting-pot. The novel humorously presents and critiques several competing futurisms – religious, political and scientific. For Smith, human destiny is not something we have a lot of say over. We may have small prisms of choice, but for thoroughly postmodern Zadie, to claim to have a uniform explanation, whether it be religious or rationalist, flies in the “teeth” of the hilarious that is happening all around us. In the words of those other misanthropes Radiohead: “we’re all accidents waiting to happen.” We are after all, victims of the random. The best future humans, for Smith, are those that don’t succumb to some fanatical programme for change, but just love. Smith’s answer to the tension between ‘epic’ and ‘tragic’ stories is ‘comic’. For her, Adam is a clown.
What then of ‘theology’? In a sense all of these narratives are ‘theological’, whether explicitly so or not. A Christian theology, however, presents a point from which both kinds of narrative may be subject to critique. Much of Smith’s critical vision finds itself endorsed from a Christian theological point of view. However, Christian theology tells a story of its own (‘gospel’) about the future of humanity. Adam, in this story, is redeemed by the second Adam.

As Irenaeus of Lyon observed, the New Testament compresses the story of humanity into the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. It is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which took place by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 4:17) that is the type of our destiny, sown in dishonour and raised in glory. Having made reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth, Jesus of Nazareth is the exact radiance of God’s being, the image of the invisible God. Remarkably, the transformation was won from within the human sphere, by a man in the likeness of sinful flesh.

From Sydney to Skopje 6

On Saturday morning we drove to Strumica, about 150 klms from Skopje. Strumica is a town of about 50,000 people surround by villages and farms, and behind them (as everywhere in Macedonia) mountains.

On Saturday I spoke at the Evangelical church in Strumica on 'The Christian Life'. There were 30 or so present including a group that had driven an hour from the town of Stip.



In the evening, I gave my 'Martyrdom and Identity' lecture to an audience of about 60 in a local hotel. There was an interview organised beforehand with the local TV station. I was simply asked 'why are you here and what are you talking about about' - to which I said some things about the death of Christ and its implications for life today!

We stayed overnight in Kosta's family's home in a local village and woke up to fields of poppies, free range chickens and the clip-clopping of horse and carts.

I first went to preach at the church in the village of Monospitivo - which is actually the parent church to the one in the much larger town of Strumica. We sang Amazing Grace and Great is thy Faithfulness in Macedonian. The number gathered was larger than I expected - and the welcome was warm. The pastor suggested that Sydney and Monospitivo might be made sister cities...!


It was then off to Strumica for the 11am service, where I preached once more - the last of my speaking engagements in Macedonia.

The afternoon afforded time for a quick look at some natural wonders, before we journeyed back to Skopje. There had been a small earthquake while we were away!



Tomorrow morning I begin my trip home to Sydney. Almost home!

From Sydney to Skopje 5

On Wednesday night, the Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture held an event at a centrally located venue in Skopje at which I spoke on 'Martyrdom and Identity'. Professor Ljubomir Cuculovski of the Philosophy department at the University very kindly agreed to be a respondent to my paper. We then had a very interesting and pleasant discussion with those present, in which Macedonian Orthodox, Protestant, and more secular views were aired and respectfully engaged with. There were upwards of 50 people there). This event has been perhaps most representative of what the BIFC is about.



On Thursday, I had an interview with a journalist from the Macedonian government television station. It is the middle of an election campaign here, so that she was able to slot us in was an answer to prayer. I was able to speak about Christian martyrdom and to underline the importance of the person and work of Christ. The programme will appear soon.



I then went to preach at the Thursday evening church service at the Evangelical Church. I preached on Jesus's work to defeat the works of the devil, from 1 John 3:8.

Today, Friday, Kosta and I were interviewed by a young documentary film maker who is trying to produce a film on the importance of love for religious traditions. Her first question? 'What is the basis for your belief?' We had a really interesting discussion on whether love is God (as opposed to God being love).




I then held a seminar on 'Research Methods' for the BIFC. This was an open invitation once more. This time the venue was the BIFC's offices in Skopje. Seven people attended, from Orthodox, Protestant and other backgrounds. We were able to talk about the importance of scholarly research actually serving others and not being just an end in itself.



It's off to Strumica in the east of Macedonia this weekend for more lectures, seminars and sermons!

From Sydney to Skopje 4

After preaching twice on Sunday, Monday was a public holiday - which has afforded me some time to look around and take in the lovely scenery which surrounds Skopje.

But it was back to work on Tuesday. First, I had the opportunity to address a public meeting at the University of SS Cyril and Methodius on the topic 'The Gospel according to Mark Zuckerberg? Mastering the New Social Media'.

This event was co-hosted by the department of Political Science and the Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture. It was well-attended and the discussion was vigorous and interesting!

From there I went to a meeting of the student group Egzodus and spoke on 'The word of God is not in chains'.

On the Birthday of the KJV: why should we care? | Eternity

On the Birthday of the KJV: why should we care? Eternity

From Sydney to Skopje 3 - Theological Anthropology

I am here in Macedonia as a guest of the newly founded Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture, which is run by my good friends Kosta and Nada Milkov:




One of the things that the BFIC would like to promote is a series of lectures/seminars for pastors called 'Theology for Life'. Yesterday I began teaching a group of around twenty evangelical pastors and pastor's wives from all over the country and from Bulgaria as well my 'Theological Anthropology' material. There were Baptists, Congregationalists, independents, and others too. The material was designed for Moore College's MA course/4th year programme - that is, for theology graduates who are in pastoral ministry or about to enter it, but with a degree of assumed knowledge. The group of pastors and their wives certainly all fit this profile, and participated knowledgeably and insightfully. I am completing the course today (Saturday) by teaching from 9am to 6pm. I believe we will be stopping for lunch!

Here is Kosta at the church building where the seminar is being held.

This is the Evangelical Church of Macedonia in Skopje.

This is the seminar about to get down to work.

And here we are four hours later having finished for the evening. It was a very enjoyable time with a lot of stimulating discussion and plenty of laughs!

From Sydney to Skopje 2

So I have mostly recovered from my jetlag, and I don't look so much like this anymore:

I have been resting up good at Kosta, Nada and Gabriella's flat in Skopje:

They have real mountains here - and you can almost see them in my poor photograph:

Then on Thursday afternoon I went to my first speaking event at the Evangelical Church in Skopje. I was speaking on 'The Christian Life - Faith, Prayer, Obedience:

30 or more people turned up from 4pm, and then at 6pm my last talk was part of a service that including singing and prayer. We sang 'Blessed be the Name' and 'Lord I lift your name on high'. As it turned out, we were also visited by a mission team from a bible college in Tirana, Albania who in turn brought with them some Italians. So I had my talk translated into Macedonian, Albanian and Italian. It was a lively meeting!

We then went out for some food:

Tomorrow I am teaching Theological Anthroplogy to a group of pastors and others. Ciao!

From Sydney to Skopje 1 - Vienna Airport

True Feelings Conference - Brochure and Registration now available.

Brochure HERE

Register online HERE

Andrew Cameron's Joined-Up Life

My colleague and friend Andrew Cameron has just published his book Joined-Up Life. It's an account of what we usually call 'ethics'.

Anyone who knows Andrew will know that he is one of the most perceptive and interesting Christian thinkers around. I am about 100 pages in and I can say already that the book marries pith and profoundity - no mean feat.

If you are free, and in Skopje on 4th May...

Euthanasia as corrosive of care relationships

I was once privileged, when I was a School Chaplain several years ago, to lead an hour-long discussion with a class of sixteen year olds on the question of suicide.
As Chaplain, I was privy to information that many in the class were not: that there were at any given time as many as ten students in the school for whom there was grave concern about the possibility that they might attempt self-harm.

The question I put to the students was this: what would you do if a friend of yours told you that they had decided to kill themselves?

The answer was chilling – more chilling than they realised. As one they insisted that, although this was a sad circumstance, you ought not intervene and tell someone else they couldn’t do it, if that was their decision. You could certainly not say to the person that they were doing the wrong thing.

For the students, the autonomous decision of the individual was absolutely sacrosanct, even to this terrible point.

This story is not about euthanasia, exactly, but it is about the kind of moral language we are equipped with and with which we are equipping young people. And it demonstrates the prison into which we have locked ourselves with the language of free choice. The priority of the individual’s right to choose renders us inarticulate just where we most need to say something. It coarsens our moral language. It makes us unable to say to someone else: ‘You can rely on me to stay with you and preserve your life as far as I can even when you feel like doing harm to yourself.’

It is the language of moral autonomy that propels the push for voluntary euthanasia, and renders us speechless to oppose it. For if my individual freedom to choose is the trump card in all moral questions, then the best thing that the law can do is to facilitate that choice. In this instance, that means legislating so as to enable the medical profession to assist in the suicide of terminally ill patients in their care should the patient seek to be so assisted. If individual choice is ultimate, then it seems to me there is no argument.

But I would argue that, as a theological perspective shows us, individual choice is not ultimate. It is part of a whole suite of moral factors that have bearing on these very complex and difficult circumstances. The choice to end one’s own life is, in most circumstances, an immoral choice that the law should protect us from making; and in which the law should protect others from complicity.

Why is this?
Because we are, as the Christian story tells us and plain observation confirms, not essentially agents of individual choice, but creatures made for community. We are made for love and trust more than we are made for freedom. And it is to love sustained by trust that we owe our moral decision-making, and not to freedom. It is not permission that we need, but a knowledge of what our licence to act in a certain way might cost others.

We should remember that for Christians, life itself is not an absolute good, nor even the highest of goods. Christians carry before them an astonishing symbol - the cross of Jesus Christ. At the very centre of the Christian gospel is an act of voluntary self-sacrifice to suffering and death. This is what Christians call ‘the good news’. That free laying down of one’s life becomes in the New Testament the very source of life for those who follow Christ. And it becomes the model for their lives in turn. The Christian is called to a cross-shaped existence as an echo of and a testimony to that relinquishing of a life that others may live. Christians are those who are ready to die for what they believe – and have done so in their droves down the centuries.

What does this teach us? That life is good as a wonderful gift from a good creator, but that it is not the ultimate good. There are some things that are worth giving up your precious life for. As American theologian Stanley Hauerwas says: ‘Dying is not the tragedy but … dying for the wrong thing’. Christians repudiated the Roman cult of noble suicide to preserve one’s honour. But they certainly accepted that a violent death might well be the price of a life lived in the service of God. Greater love has no-one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

What the martyrs show us is that death is unavoidable – but that the manner in which one dies may remarkably affirm human life. If a death affirms human life it must do so by affirming the communities of trust and care that are basic to human existence. One of the basic conditions that shapes human community is our willingness to live and our assumption that others share it.

If we have some manner of control about the manner of our dying, then, let us rule out the possibility that the voluntary euthanasia proposal may well afford us. Because death seems so lonely, the temptation to which we may succumb is to think of our dying as an isolated incident quite apart from anyone else. What is in fact the case is that in calling on others to assist us in ending our life, we are normalising this manner of death. We are inviting the medical profession to ask why the person in the next bed has not chosen the same but is insisting on staying alive when the bed is needed and the palliative care is expensive. We are inviting our community to increase its loveless-ness towards the elderly and the sick – after all, if their choice is to stay alive, then they can be blamed for it.

Law is a blunt instrument in the moral life. I am not heedless that the change in the law is sought for the purpose of alleviating great suffering. But the law can help us here by preparing us for the human-ness of our death. It can restrain us from insisting on a death which will corrode the community’s commitment to care for the elderly and the sick. It can restrain our tendency to see the aging population as an accounting problem. It can restrain us from investing far too much moral authority in the medical profession, under the illusion that men and woman of science deal only in tangible facts. It can restrain us from on insisting on a right to die which comes at the cost of another’s right to stay alive.

The pressure on the sick, the disabled and the dying is already there. We cannot, as those who are schooled in the gospel of Jesus Christ, commit to a policy which deepens their abandonment, nor can we commend it to our community.

Is God a bloke? | Eternity

Is God a bloke? Eternity

Sydney and Anglican: A Fresh Look at Mission

It's a conference. June 17. Only $40 (very good value at today's rates!)