Elucidations

  If there is a controversial figure in Christianity beyond Jesus himself it is his mother Mary. I have found people who love her more than Jesus, people hostile to her as a distraction to faith and people who cannot understand the fuss about her. Mary rides on controversies about authority in the church, the nature of prayer and the experience of the supernatural. Shedding light on her is about opening closed doors between Catholic and Protestant and windows to the breeze of the Spirit of truth linked to Mary. Sally came to see me because she could only pray to Mary. She knew as a Christian she should pray to Jesus but guilt about her son’s marriage breakdown prevented her. She felt Jesus was angry with her so it was better to go to Mary. In ministering to her I discovered something of a culture alien to me in which the saints rather than Jesus are go-betweens with God. Meeting Sally confirmed prejudice instilled in me about Catholics being on the wrong track about Mary as I was a...

  There is no proof of Christ’s resurrection, only strong evidence. That is the case for any past event. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus stems from the faith of the church and an accumulation of evidence. In past ages its significance was limited to proving the divinity of Christ so that his birth was the incarnation of God and his suffering the overcoming of sin and death. Nowadays Christ’s resurrection is seen as more central than confirmatory both to the church’s transformational dynamic and to apologetics, the reasoned defence or ‘apologia’ of Christian faith. Christianity stands or falls on the event which has a documented history whilst being a metaphysical (‘beyond the natural’) event with significance beyond history.  Defending the resurrection we sail ‘between the Scylla of critical pedantry and the Charybdis of vaguely religious psychology’ (Rowan Williams). If we make the establishing of the empty tomb narratives our goal that can reduce to pedantry because it i...

  ‘If it were true it would be cosmic child abuse’ I’ve heard in and outside Christian circles in response to the understanding of God’s love shown in the Cross. The idea of God willing his Son to suffer and die to make things right in the world raises more questions for some people than living agnostic with the wrongs. That there is no official doctrine of atonement - how God and humanity are made one in Christ - makes for another complication. So does the simplification of thinking on the Cross to throw a line to Christian seekers not to mention poetic licence employed in hymns about the passion of Christ. Evangelical songwriter Stuart Townend weathered criticism for these lines in his hymn In Christ Alone: ‘on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied’. At the other side of the Christian spectrum this phrase in a Roman Catholic prayer has detractors: ‘Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church and… the sacrificial Victim by whose death you willed to reconcil...

  ‘I prayed with my heart, everything around me seemed delightful and marvellous. The trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, the light seemed to be telling me that they existed for man’s sake, that they witnessed to the love of God for man, that everything proved the love of God for man, that all things prayed to God and sang his praise.’ This description of prayer captures the sense of God in all things central to Christianity. It comes from the Russian classic ‘Way of a Pilgrim’ which encourages repeating the Jesus Prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ as aid to praying without ceasing and feeling one with nature. Given the enormity of the environmental crisis I find this sense of creation praising God in tension with its ‘groaning in labour pains’ awaiting ‘be[ing] set free from its bondage to decay [to] obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Romans 8:21-22). Both passages, ‘Way of a Pilgrim’ and Romans, imply a link betwee...

  ‘Does life begin at conception or birth? Neither - it begins when the children leave home!’ It’s good to hopefully get a laugh out of a serious matter that frequently sets Christians at loggerheads with their contemporaries. Thanks to medical science and Ultrasound technology everyone is able to see what only God saw before, life in the womb, and that knowledge can be problematic. So many blessings have come to pregnant women from ultrasound scans and yet the information provided has led some parents into agonising decision making. Where handicap is evident, should the pregnancy proceed? Being Pro-Life in a narrow definition is associated with accepting any unborn child as God’s gift of a new life rejecting abortion. The label ‘Pro-Choice’ affirms a mother’s right over her body including her right to destroy any foetus she is bearing if she judges their life prospects as weak or the birth as being against her own interests. Already the word ‘life’ is being used in two senses, one...

  We have close friends who are Orthodox Jews. They have been to Church with us and we have gone with them to Synagogue. In recent years our conversations have brought out ongoing sadness in the departure of several of their Jewish friends to Israel as a result of feeling at the sharp end of growing anti-semitism in the UK. In one of his last ‘Thoughts of the Day’ on BBC in November 2019 the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (above with the Queen) said: ‘A few days ago, two Jewish children were sitting with their parents in a train on the London Underground when a man came up to them and for almost twenty minutes harangued them with antisemitic abuse. Someone intervened but was threatened with violence. Then a young woman confronted the man, and calmly told him what he was doing was wrong. This distracted him and saved the day. It was a heroic act. The hero was a young Muslim woman wearing a hijab… That we in Britain should still be talking about antisemitism, Islamophobia, or racism at al...