Tuesday 30 September 2014

Morals blog: Telling the Truth

Truth, Liars & God

Truth
I found an interesting section on 'Truth' in Leon Morris's commentary on John's Gospel. Here is the gist of what he said:

In Greek writings the basic idea of truth is the mathematical one (ie “1+1=2” is true) plus the idea of reality as opposed to mere appearance. The Old Testament concept is similar but richer. It includes faithfulness, reliability, trustworthiness, sureness and the like.

This enriched concept comes from OT descriptions of God. So truth is characteristic of God e.g. Ps.31;5 and Isaiah.65:16 “the God of truth”. Truth includes the complete reliability and complete integrity of God, so he will act in accordance with the highest conceivable morality. So the psalmist can offer a prayer in Ps.54:5 which older translations render “destroy (my enemies) in your truth” which newer translations render “in your faithfulness”.

The New Testament, Morris continues, blends the Greek and enriched OT meanings of “truth”. So in Romans 1:25 truth is seen as close to God's essential nature: idolatry is characterised as exchanging the truth of God for a lie. Elsewhere the NT speaks of truth frequently, such as Eph.4:21 where Morris insists the correct translation is “as truth is in Jesus”. “The truth of the Gospel” (Gal.2:5) and the requirement for truth to be exemplified in believers in many passages, e.g. 1 Cor.5.8 believers must keep a real festival “with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth”

John's Gospel excels in depicting Jesus as truth. According to Bultman for John 'truth = God's reality', which since God is the creator is the only true reality.

John uses “truth some some 25 times in his gospel. He describes Jesus as “full of grace and truth” (1:14) and Jesus says “I am the truth” (14:6) to pick two. Bultman concludes: “So truth is not the teaching about God transmitted by Jesus but is God's very reality revealing itself – occurring! - in Jesus.”

Pilate famously asked Jesus “What is truth?”. Jesus gave no answer in words. The narrative of Jesus' suffering, death and resurrection gave the answer in actions. Truth as Jesus thus portrayed it was a very costly affair.

So when Jesus said “the truth will set you free” (8:31) he did not mean mean mere intellectual freedom. He meant the liberating experience of being his person – freedom from sin and guilt, adoption as sons and daughters of God and a future and a hope that liberates from the fear of death.

Morris concludes: “The connection with Jesus is essential to the idea of truth as we see it in this gospel. It starts from the essential nature of God, it finds its expression in the gospel whereby God saves humans and it issues in lives founded on truth and showing forth truth.”

Lies

Jesus set out the Dichotomy neatly when he said “(the devil) was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is not truth in him. When he lies he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell you the truth you do not believe me!”

So as truth is part if God's moral character, so lies are of the devil's. We can take this a step further with a working hypothesis that truth and truth telling are an integral part of a whole behaviour set we call “virtue” whilst lies and lying ring together with evil character traits.

We might also abstract from Jesus' experience with his contemporaries that there is some fault in human nature that makes lies seem attractive, believable almost while the truth seems unattractive and so truth tellers are not believed and even branded as “liars”.

Going on from Jesus' comments, the Genesis narrative is instructive. God says basically: “eat the forbidden fruit and you die”. The serpent says: “you won't die”. Then sweetens it with “you will become like God knowing good and evil”.

The genealogy in Gen.5 says over and over “… lived so many years and he died” hammering home the point that God told the truth but the serpent lied.

The serpent's sweetener was a more devious species of lie: it was true except at the vital point. Our progenitors did get to know good and evil. They did in an empty way become like God. But in all that mattered they had become totally unlike and separated from God. God knew what evil was, but remained totally good: they had actually done evil and had thereby been irreversibly tainted by it.

I have just been doing a bit of a word search (the site: www.biblegateway.com is helpful for this) on truth and lies. One gets the strong message that truth and truth telling are integral to God's moral character, and essential in people who wish to live to please him. The idea of lies and lying seems to have two particular emphases: the perversion of justice in the law courts and people who claim to speak for God misrepresenting him – to the ruin of their listeners.

The perversion of justice appears as something God hates with a passion. It is instructive that God is really in favour of the “secular” law courts and gets very angry when they become corrupt.

Isaiah 59 is a beautiful and poetic example: “… because of your sins God has hidden his face from you … No one calls for justice, no one pleads a case with integrity. They rely on empty arguments, they utter lies. … So justice is driven back and righteousness stands at a distance. Truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter. Truth is nowhere to be found and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey.”

The other focus is on people who claim to speak for God telling lies. This seems to be in the Bible almost the constant state of the religious establishment – a sad fact that should make us critically examine our current churches.

One example is Jeremiah where this theme runs right through the book. The overview is that God is warning the nation that it will be destroyed if it maintains its current moral, religious and geopolitical stance. The religious establishment refute this message and claim that God is pleased with the nation and will protect it. The king and people follow the (lying) advice of the “church”. The nation is destroyed, the temple burned, and the populace deported in chains by the enraged Babylonians.

So God's warnings depicted reality. The “church”'s lies did not correspond to reality. Finally reality bit with a vengeance!

Just one quote, Jeremiah 27.14ff “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who say to you, 'You will not serve the king of Babylon' for they are prophesying lies to you. 'I have not sent them' declares Jehovah. 'They are prophesying lies in my name ...”

To sum up: Truth is what corresponds to reality, including God's reality: lies are denying reality. The truth may be unpalatable or even inconvenient. Lies may sound sweet – but following them leads to harm or even ruin. Telling lies may seem to offer an easy way out – but it is morally wrong. People who want to take God's moral character as a guide must learn to be truth tellers.


Next week we will debunk the “hard cases” sceptics use to try to make us doubt the general rule of truth telling.

Saturday 27 September 2014

My Adventures with God Ch.19

Ch 19: Prayer & Preaching .

In Acts 6:4 the apostles when faced with other calls on their energies, delegate some responsibilities and choose: “We will devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the word”. Throughout this period of revival this choice the Apostles made was present in my mind. The fact that they found that prayer and preaching were vital to the dramatic spread of Christianity in their time had to be taken seriously.

Lay involvement in church ministry was a bit of a fad at that time, so in encouraging lay people, particularly our new converts to share in things like pastoral care I was not doing anything very unusual. Although I do remember one vestry meeting where as I explained this one woman burst out: “Why should we pay a dog and bark too!” so there those who thought differently.

I will talk more about this whole-body-of-believers taking up the work of Christ later. For this blog I want to focus on prayer and preaching as a priority I felt I should set myself as the minister.

Prayer for revival.
One time an older man in Koo-wee-rup bailed me up in the street and asked what I did between Sundays. When you think about it this was rather funny in a farming community – I don't think he would have asked a sheep farmer what he did to fill in his time! However being young and a bit innocent I told him – including the hours I spent in prayer each day. To this he contemptuously retorted: “Shouldn't take you more than five minutes to say your prayers!”.

These days God has very kindly put me out to pasture for a spell and it does only take me five minutes to say my prayers. In those days I was working for him to bring people to salvation and part of that work was serious prayer. It was 'work' and it took a great deal of time. It was not a burden, it was not something I had to force myself to do or anything like that. In this sort of revival prayer it is Christ who works in us to inspire both the will and the deed to his chosen purpose. Then he delights in displaying his power by answering those prayers even more abundantly than we could imagine!

Looking back I can't say how much was decision of will and how much was pushing by the Holy Spirit. Certainly I wanted people to come to Christ. Inez, who I will introduce in a moment, once said that my “sole desire was souls”. Out of love for Christ yes it was. So once I understood from the scriptures and reading about earlier Christian revivals that devotion to prayer was vital yes I made a decision of will to try to devote myself to prayer. But if it had been just my decision, they would just have been dry and dusty prayers. I would have soon given up. And I really don't think God would have answered them. It is in part our decision, God is like that, he wants us to choose to be part of his work and he wants us to chose to treat his work as more important than other pursuits: but it it also totally the work of his Holy Spirit in us.

Excursus on prayer

Just to be straight on this: when people say “Prayer works” I think, “No! Prayer does not work. God works! He is just really kind in allowing us to have a little part in his work when he does really powerful things in response even to our feeble requests.”

What I mean is this. The big mistake pagans make, and some Christians copy is to think that “prayer” is some sort of magic humans can work. It really isn't! Prayer is part of our life with God. It includes making requests to a most wonderful, loving and infinitely wise Heavenly Father. The “faith” element in our prayer life includes trusting that God is much wiser than we are and that often we will pour out our hearts to him asking him to do things we include things which would not be right or we ask him to give us things which even a human parent would refuse to give because they know that would be bad for the child. So faith is trusting God to on occasion answer “No” or “Not yet” or “Let s talk about that some more so you can understand my ways better” or even “I can do better than that”.

True Christian prayer and pagan magical incantations could not be more different! Do not confuse them!

On the topic of prayer, of course God knows what we need before we ask. But he likes us to ask. And sometimes he will do things when we do ask that he would not do if we did not ask.

That can be a heavy responsibility especially if God has put you in a position of leadership where you and not anyone else are the one who must ask him for a certain thing to be done! People in special positions of authority do have both greater opportunity to ask certain things of God, and more terrible fault before him if they do not.

Moses is the example that got to me. Psalm 106 :23 says:
So he said he would destroy them—
    had not Moses, his chosen one,
stood in the breach before him
    to keep his wrath from destroying them.
The image this evokes is of a warrior of old standing in a gap where the city wall has been broken down by the enemy and denying them entrance. It is a courageous and lonely stand! When God places one of us in some position of responsibility and authority there are times when the fate of those or the enterprise which we serve hangs in the balance and only we can stand in the breach before God in prayer such that he will act to save.

Coming back to general prayer for revival of Christianity, my researches have led me to this conclusion: God is kindly letting us have a little slice of the action, but it is still and always his action.

One example of this which really struck me was in reading about some of the revivals of past generations. True, they described the fervent united prayer that went on before and during the revival. But I got the strong impression that it was always God who sent the desire and earnestness for that prayer to his people first. I suppose they could have ignored his call and perhaps he would not then have sent revival. But they did respond, and in many cases God responded with incredible power. I remember reading of one revival where the grace of God fell on a town with such intensity that even people travelling into town were immediately falling to their knees and surrendering their lives to God.

The reverse does not, I think, hold. Sometimes people (or more usually church leaders) think that a revival would be nice, and issue a call to fervent united prayer. But it is all human decision not a response to God's call. Not surprisingly it all fizzles out. I suspect that in those instances we are just in a tiny way re-enacting what happened when the Israelites first refused to enter Canaan: God told them to turn back to the desert. Then they said: “No, we are feeling braver now, we will go up and conquer the promised land”. They were, as God had warned them, smartly chased out of it by the Canaanites.

So, effective prayer for revival has at God's call and in response to God's call.


Preaching for Revival

I expected people to be converted during my sermons, and they were.

The lectionary does, over a three year cycle, get through a great deal of the Bible and I generally expounded one of the set readings. It is a good discipline making you preach on parts of the Bible you might otherwise avoid. So by honestly expounding one of the three (Old Testament, Epistle, & Gospel) scripture portions set for the day I frequently ended up teaching some aspect of putting our faith in Christ and giving our obedience to Christ.

So I preached for conversion and for growth. Some who we saw blossom as Christians may have believed as much as they knew for many years, and now as they understood more their faith became more conspicuous. Ian was one of these. Ian was a retired dairy farmer. He was not one for reading. He could not, I think, even to his dying day, have parroted off any of the popular evangelical formulas. If anyone had posed to question to him: “Are you saved?” he would have wondered what they were talking about. But Jesus he understood. Jesus he trusted and on Jesus he tried to model his life.

Inez was a representative of the more sudden response to hearing Jesus preached about. Inez was the wife of the doctor in Lang Lang. Innez and Orrie had emigrated from Scotland some twenty years before we arrived. As their children had grown up Innez had been active in many of the social circles of the town from Pony Club to the Agricultural Show Committee. My wife Sue being a doctor had taken to working one day a week with Orrie in Lang Lang and another in the Koo-wee-rup practice.

Because Sue was helping in their practice, Innez became curious about what sort of preacher I might be and came along to church. She heard the sermon and re-committed her life to Christ. From that time on she became one of the most stalwart workers for the Gospel, and also a gift from God beyond price for our whole family.

Blow-ins were an important and unpredictable part of preaching. This is jumping forward in time again, but fits with this topic. I can only say God sent some people along to church to hear and then go. It got to be quite funny – God, as you may have discovered has a tremendous sense of humour. In the middle years particularly, Jan the churchwarden would frequently take malicious delight in pronouncing just before the service was due to begin, with just a handful of regulars were seated in church; “Well looks like that's all you're getting today!” when one or two entire families would come bustling in the door! Sometimes they were people I had met through marriage preparation, or funerals but often they were complete strangers. On those frequent and delightful occasions I always thought I was given something to preach especially for these visitors. So I was not perturbed if the people were strangers who I never saw again. I was just delighted that God had used me as one little bit of his work in their lives. Often ones I have contact with for marriage preparation who came for a while to church did come to faith in Christ, but as I mentioned in the last blog, for many this church was not a welcoming place. God had to, and I believe did, provide the help they needed for the next step with him.


Tuesday 23 September 2014

Morals Blog: Truth & Lies

Liars & Truth tellers – Part 2


At least by kindergarten we have gained a working knowledge of truth and lies. We have heard, if not been a player in conversations along the lines of: “You took my toy.” “Did not.” “Did too, I saw you!” “Liar!”.

We quickly develop a keen sense of wrong (at least when we are the wronged party) at both false accusation and untruthful responses to true accusation. I suspect this is more than “mere” socialisation and that it is something necessary, perhaps basic to humans living together in groups.

We do in fact have a good grasp of common lying and truth telling. We should not allow the sort of moral philosopher who delights in posing extreme hypothetical cases to unnerve our confidence. As with the Commandment “You shall not murder” we may find that the rule requires 'absolute' obedience in situations where it applies, but that it does not apply in every conceivable situation. So we will start with the common situations which we already understand.

In this discussion I will use “true” and “false” in the mathematical sense so that for instance the statement “1 + 1 = 1” is false and “1 + 1 = 2” is true. Yes I do know that there are philosophies that wish to define these terms in various different ways but at this stage I just want to talk about the common-or-garden variety truth and falsehood.

So for instance, when our third grade teacher noted the absence of our homework book and said: “You haven't handed in your homework”. We knew that was a true statement. When she asked why we hadn't, things got interesting. We knew the true reason, whatever it may have been. Perhaps it was that we chose to play games until bed-time instead of doing dull old homework. We also knew that saying this would earn us a detention. So we faced a temptation to tell a lie. Perhaps to reply: “I did do my homework but the dog ate it” We knew it was a lie.

At that age we were not very practised liars so we may have given ourselves away by blushing. If we repeatedly found that lying allowed us to escape unpleasant consequences or to gain material advantage over truth tellers we may have become habitual liars. In time we certainly became much more practised and convincing at telling lies. We may have become so habitually untruthful that we ceased to even think of them as 'lies', but way back there was still a time when we did know that we were lying.

In third grade we may not have realised that our teacher had already heard all the lies that little boys and girls think are so clever and inventive. With age and practice we became much better at it. We may eventually even have come to convince ourselves with our inventions. But there was a time when we knew we were concocting a lie.

We all from time to time find ourselves in situations where we are tempted to lie. Maybe “we have done those things which we aught not to have done” or “we have left undone those things which we aught to have done” as the old Prayer Book confession put it. When we are questioned about our acts of commission or omission, we instantly realise that the truth is not what we really want to say.

We have probably all met people who in such a circumstance still tell the truth. Sometimes humbly, sometimes prudently. Someone famous once said: “When in a difficult situation always tell the truth: it will astound you friends and confound your enemies.” Either way, we know what a truthful person is.

We have undoubtedly met habitual liars, so we know what they look like.

Ordinary people tend to fall in the middle. They agree that lying is bad and truth telling is good – especially for other people. They probably tell the truth themselves whenever they may conveniently do so. But at least occasionally either as a barely though out response or as a calculated evasion, they tell a lie.

So having established common ground, how can we explore this topic further? In this series of blogs I have been trying to establish a groundwork of morals based on the moral character of God. At the beginning I argued that if there is no God then there is actually no grounds on which to discuss morals.

I know we do in fact discuss morals and that humans throughout history have so. But then I also know that there is a God.

My point is that if there were no God then there could be no basis for discussing morals. All there could be is some variation this theme: the ubermensch make whatever rules they feel like and the slaves are taught to obey them.

Alternatively, if God exists, then God's moral character, so far as it may be known, provides the ultimate and only valid standard for judging right and wrong.

So for this topic I am not going to look at the social utility of truth telling against the social or even personal harm of lying, real though these aspects may be. Instead, now that we have reviewed what we commonly understand by both telling the truth and lying, I want to look at what we know of God's moral character in relation to them.


As they used to say on the radio: “tune in same station same time next week for the next exciting episode!”




Friday 19 September 2014

My Adventures with God

Ch 18: Plus all the usual methods.


Not everything we did was new. We tried the usual evangelistic methods as well.

Evangelistic Missions with a special round of meetings and activities, usually involving a guest missioner was one. It had been done, we were told many times in the parish. The congregation enjoyed these missions, which were, we were told with some emphasis, for the existing congregants, not for outsiders. The idea was, so we were informed, to re-vitalise the members.

We did do some of these, because re-vitalising is good. We did more aimed at outsiders because reaching people who have drifted away from God or who have never understood his call for them to come to him through his son is even better.

One of the first sort actually came to us. An elderly (he was actually only 74 which does not seem so 'elderly' now!) member of a congregation at the other end of the diocese contacted me. His story was that he had been a faithful Anglican all his life. He had worked hard all his adult life for “the church” and had been on vestry and other church committees. Then quite recently he had discovered a new personal relationship with Jesus. Looking back he realised that although he had gone through life thinking he was a good Christian, he had actually never taken the final step to actually become a Christian. He was now dedicating himself to going around churches in the diocese (with the bishop's blessing) telling his story.

I invited him to come. He stayed with us in the rectory, and spoke at church. He spoke simply but movingly. To those who had ears he was calling people to take the step from “churchianity” to Christianity. The elderly Lang Lang congregation heard him out with cold politeness. The Koo-wee-rup congregation heard and believed. When he made his call for people who, like him had been involved with church but now wanted to give their hearts completely to God through Christ the entire congregation leapt to their feet.

There were going to be difficult times ahead involving some of the Koo-wee-rup congregation but despite this I can say that there was a change in that church from this moment of re-commitment.

For reaching out to the general community missions were a bit of a failure. We tried them. We had a certain amount of success. Some ministers would have been delighted with that amount of success. However we found other means were far more successful.

One problem we faced I will flag for the benefit of others: Beware the gatekeepers. There are, in all social settings, people who by one means or another facilitate access for some people and deny access to others. Sometimes obviously, sometimes in very subtle ways. They are known as “gate keepers”.

If you are working to bring people to believe in Jesus and then become part of an existing community of believers you really need to beware of that community's gatekeepers. If they are being used by God they may be tremendous in facilitating the entry of tentative new believers. If they are dominated by their human nature they will hinder, and likely completely frustrate your efforts.

Let me give you some examples.

First a positive. Later in the 1980's while on holidays I visited an Anglican church in the Sydney suburb of St. Ives. It had a name for being a dynamic church. I had to park a little way off down the street. Almost as soon as I got out of the car I was gripped by an inexplicable sense of excitement. I also saw people streaming into the church building and had that affirming feeling of being part of something. The official welcomers at the church door impressed me. But I had hardly sat down with my children when the girl seated in front turned round and engaged them all in friendly conversation, and made them feel truly welcome. I made a habit of visiting churches whenever I was on holidays but I had never encountered anything which would make me want to join a congregation as much as that experience. That church understood about effective, Holy Spirit motivated gatekeepers.

The next two examples are negative, and from my church at Lang Lang.

I said we did do some evangelistic missions aimed primarily at outsiders. As one of these was about to take place I encouraged a woman who had recently come to faith in Jesus to attend the meeting, which was being held in the civic hall. I had thought that a neutral location in the community hall, rather than in the church or our own hall would be more attractive, or at least less threatening to people outside the small regular congregation. I was wrong.

The programme went well, and was well attended by some sections of the community. But the new convert did not come. I asked her why not. Her reply was this. “I did come. I got as far as the glass doors to the hall. Then I looked through them and saw who was there and I knew I could not go in with those people, so I went home again.”

Gatekeepers. She saw the gatekeepers of my congregation. She knew them and knew they knew her. They didn't have to say a word to her, they possibly never even saw her hesitate outside the glass doors. Gatekeepers get to be what they are by being very good at it, they have a vast array of social skills and psychological weapons to achieve their purpose. They can be ever so subtle. You may not pick what they are doing. Especially since you may not understand the criteria on which they will facilitate entry to the group for some people, be neutral to some, and then bar entry to others. So you may be able to add some people to your congregation and so think “I have no gatekeepers to worry about” not realising that some little “lambs” who are infinitely precious to Jesus are being turned away by them!

Of course some, possibly driven by desperation to find peace with God, will try so hard to come to church that less subtle methods are required by the gatekeepers.

This incident is from a slightly later time when our work in the local high school was having results. A young teenage girl came to the Lang Lang church. It is a small town, and Jan the churchwarden who was always on “welcoming” duty knew the girl, at least by reputation. But this girl, whatever the truth of the gossip about her morals, had come to some of our meetings at the high school and had now come to church looking for God.

It was a few minutes before the service. I was at the front of the church when I glimpsed her approaching Jan at the back to receive the necessary hymn and prayer books. I started down the isle straight away to greet her. I was just close enough to see Jan block the entrance to the church with her arms folded aggressively in front of her. Then I heard her say: “Well cheek of you coming here – wonder the church doesn't fall down!”. The girl turned and fled before I could do anything. She never came back.

And Jesus said: “If anyone causes one of these little ones to stumble ...” !!!!

So how to deal with your gatekeepers. I always find prayer is 90% of it. Prayer for the gatekeepers – they are indeed being used by the devil – but so is every one of us the moment we stop giving every moment over to God – so pray for their deliverance. Pray for God to thwart their moves. What they are doing is wrong. They may reject God's entreaties and chose to indulge their human instincts. They need to be stopped or circumvented. Pray for God to use a bit of his power to right the wrongs. Pray for God's protection for the people he wants to add to his community. Pray for wisdom: sometimes the quickest way through an obstacle is to go around it!

In following blogs I will describe a number of ways God provided for us to by-pass Jan and her fellow gatekeepers at Lang Lang.

Going door-to-door is another standard evangelistic method. On the whole I don't think it works very well, but we did try it with some success.

I must say I didn't just do blind calls. Well not successfully at any rate. Where it worked I had prayed about who and when to visit.

One example: I prayed every day about what to do that day. This particular time I felt I should door-knock in one section of the town. One woman opened the door and asked me in. She then burst into tears and told me that I was an answer to her prayer. She said she had been a keen Christian as a teenager, but had drifted away. The years had slipped by and she now had teenage daughters of her own. She had just been praying and asking God to help her find a way back to him.

This woman, Helen, was the one who, seeing the gatekeepers, felt she could not enter the hall where our evangelistic meeting was being held. I may have been sent in answer to her prayers, but over time we saw how much she was also sent to us as an answer to prayers we hadn't even known we needed to pray at that stage! (There is an old saying in praise of efficiency: “two birds with one stone” It continually seems to me as I see God at work that he would think that even getting two birds with one stone was monstrously inefficient!)







Tuesday 16 September 2014

Morals: Liars and truth tellers part 1

Liars & Truth tellers

I often think academics in many fields, but especially academic philosophers should get a life. More to the point they should live for a while in the real world in enterprises where reality bites!

Among our distant ancestors, people who thought odd things such as that sabre-toothed tigers were really gentle, cuddly misunderstood animals generally got themselves swiftly removed from both the human intellectual and gene pools! Today however, especially in subjects like moral philosophy they get tenure, write the syllabus and influence a whole generation of students!

Let me explain further. I am not being anti-intellectual. I'm not anti-academic. I'm just against folly. Particularly the sort of folly that flourishes where ideas are divorced from their real-world consequences.

In 1990 I took a year off from being a parish priest and studied philosophy full time at the (then) prestigious University of Melbourne. Before training for the priesthood I that been a design engineer with a masters degree in mechanical engineering. One time this lecturer was belabouring the philosophic problems of “tests”, particularly the more problematic cases where a false positive (say) gave a worse outcome than a false negative. Judge Blackwood's dictum “I would rather release ten guilty murderers than hang one innocent man” is a good example. I remember thinking as I listened to this philosopher explain how philosophy had yet to solve this conundrum that all he needed to do was ask his colleagues in the engineering department. Engineers had solved it decades ago.

Engineers had faced the problem in many guises that had very strong reality feedback mechanisms.
If you are producing machines where a 50 cent component that fails costs your $5,000 to repair the damage under warranty you very quickly learn the maths of how many “good” components you are willing to reject in the process of eliminating any “bad” components.

Engineers learned to get their “theory” right because they operated in a real world where those who got it wrong went out of business!

So I am going to take a “real world” approach to this problem of truth telling and lying. If you want to see the academic philosophers' work Wikipedia has a good outline article. If you are confused by moralists who seem to delight in thinking up scenarios that seem to tip common morality on its head, stay with me I will deal with them eventually – not immediately because they simply don't warrant it. However I will quickly explain why they should be treated as charlatans.

Most of us are socialised into a functional understanding of morality.

In truth versa falsehood we have been in situations where the response “Liar!” has leapt unbidden to our minds even if not to our lips. So we in fact have a functional notion of truth and falsehood. For most of us this notion works pretty well within the range of situations we commonly face. Then along comes some teacher of moral philosophy who dazzles us with hypothetical situations in which our notions of right and wrong seem at odds with the rules of conduct we commonly employ.

Their hidden agenda is possibly only to make themselves look clever, but in the process they are prepared to make us doubt or even reject the rules we have used. Sometimes we are stupid or gullible enough to believe them.

I am calling them out as charlatans! I am saying that your common rules work in common situations. It is the common situations we need to understand and explore.

As I said earlier, we are socialised into moral understanding just as we are socialised into the complexities of social conventions. Our human brain is very good at analysing amazingly complex social situations and telling us the correct response. So if you are ever in one of these fantastical situations the well formed moral character will almost certainly choose the correct action. We need to find first the general rules for general situations, and NOT be fooled into abandoning these rules by tricksters who produce out of a hat a fantastical situation where the general rule does not apply, and who then turn our innate knowledge that in this situation the general rule does not work to make us doubt or throw out the general rule!

Let me give you an engineering example. In my first job out of university the design office I joined had just been saved from ignominy by a professor of engineering who correctly picked a situation where the general rule did not apply. This is the story:

Our office had been instructed to design a compressed air tank for starting engines on jet airliners at an airport. This seemed simple. Draughtsmen had tables of how big at tank was needed to act as a reservoir for a given delivery rate of compressed air. So they designed the tank by their normal rules. The tank was built. Then came the test. Failure! There was not enough compressed air to start even one engine on the airliner!

The draughtsmen re- checked their figures, but all seemed in order. The engineers checked the figures – and came to the same conclusion. The tank should have been big enough. In desperation a university professor was called in.

The professor solved the problem simply: “This was a special case where you could not ignore the cooling effect of adiabatic expansion”. The tables worked perfectly for “normal” compressed air systems where there was only a small amount of expansion.. The aircraft system used extremely high initial pressure with the tank run down to a comparatively low pressure. In this instance expansion was huge. The gas laws meant that the air temperature in the tank dropped hugely so the air contracted hugely, and then there was not enough volume to start the engine. He did the maths, told them how much bigger the tank had to be, it was built and it worked.

However next time they were designing a compressed air system they went back to their old tables. Why? Because at ordinary pressures adiabatic expansion was small and the tables gave the right answer. For ordinary situations the ordinary rules worked fine.


So next post let us start thinking through the ordinary ideas of truth and lies.

Friday 12 September 2014

My Adventures with God: Ch.17

Ch 17: Kids: its really easy

In Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera “the Pirates of Penzance” when Frederic, who was mistakenly apprenticed to a pirate as a boy and now come of age renounces his 'vile profession', an old hand laments: “Besides, we can offer you but little temptation to remain with us. We don't seem to make piracy pay. I'm sure I don't know why, but we don't.”
To which Frederick replies: “Well I do! But alas I may not tell you!”

People in the decades since our time at Lang Lang have often lamented in my hearing: “We just don't know how to get young people to church these days.” It has always reminded me of Frederick, and I have felt like saying; “Well I do! But alas I may not tell you!” Naturally charity and cowardice always won out and I said nothing. But it is such an important point that I will spell it out now.

Reaching young people for Jesus is simple. Hard work, but dead simple.

The reason I may not tell the people who wring their hands and lament that they cannot get young people to church these days is because their motives are wrong! They may fool themselves that they have the right motive but they don't even fool me – what chance that they can fool God!

They do not really want to bring young people to God through Jesus Christ and let them go on together. They actually want to win young people for themselves. They love their denomination or style of church service or congregation. They see its population profile ageing. They see a better future for this thing they love – denomination, congregation or church service – if young people swell the ranks. So they desire to bring young people in ….. but in to a particular human activity as a higher priority that to the one true God!

It's called “Idolatry”. No wonder God does not back up their efforts, and that it also why I would and could not tell them how it can be done!

If you want to reach young people first get your priorities straight!

They belong to Jesus! He loves them. He died for them. He bought their salvation with the price of his own blood! They are infinitely precious. Jesus said “If any one causes one of these little ones to stumble it would be better for them at the Judgement to have a large millstone tied around their necks and be thrown into the sea!”

Smart alpine hikers know the rule: “Don't get between a bear and her cubs”. Church people need to learn: “Don't get between Jesus and his little ones!” There is one and only one permitted reason to reach young people: to bring them into a relationship with Jesus, perhaps under God to help them to grow into the full stature of Christ and then in either case to step back!

If you accept your role as Jesus emissary. If you accept that they belong to Him, not to you or your way of doing church or anything else, then reaching young people is simple.

Here are some of the things we got to do:

School holidays were approaching and we had an idea. I think it was one of those human-but-God-directed ideas. At college most of the students had cut their teeth in evangelism by helping with summer “beach missions”. Officially titled “Children's Special Service Mission” CSSM for short, they were so well staffed with young evangelical men and women who formed attachments to other staffers that they were jokingly re-named: Come Single Soon Married”. However they were very effective in taking the Gospel to children who were normally outside the influence of the church. They operated by offering entertaining activities mixed with low key biblical teaching at popular family beach resorts during the summer holidays.

So we planned to put on something similar during the coming Autumn school break. Lang Lang church had no young people in the church but Koo-wee-rup had a number of young families and a dedicated band of Sunday School teachers. So we did a combined effort with activities at both churches staffed by current church people from Koo-wee-rup and mainly new believers from Lang Lang.

It was amazingly successful. Fun activities in a small country town attract bored kids like flies to a BBQ. RE classes in the schools had paved the way but now God had gone a decisive step further to breaking down the barrier dividing “the Church” from ordinary kids in the town.

We now had an “in” with Lang Lang's kids. The next step was to use it.

We believed that God intended us to use this “in” to start a Sunday School in Lang Lang. We were beginning to realise that the “old” model of Sunday School would not do at all.

Three or four decades earlier churches in general, and Lang Lang was no exception, had large Sunday Schools. Society in general was much more “churched” is was simply more socially acceptable. So parents, even though they did not necessarily attend church themselves, thought Sunday School should be part of their children's education.

By the 1980's there had been a gradual but decisive social change. Church attendances were falling. Congregations were ageing. Sunday Schools were becoming a thing of the past.

It seemed to us that to try to prop up a failing institution was wrong. We had to find a new way. A way that worked now. A way that worked with kids who knew nothing of “church” but were curious about Jesus and his love.

PS: STRATEGY TIP ... We didn't know it, but the way God was directing us, which we thought was something new we were discovering was actually tried and true military strategy! For the benefit of readers I will briefly sketch this strategy. It is called (in Australia at any rate) “Surfaces and Gaps”

What happens when rain falls on parched cracked ground? It runs off the hard baked surfaces but it seeps into the cracks!

The military analogy is this: Where your advance is meeting stiff resistance is the “surface”: where your troops are advancing easily is the crack (or gap). The temptation is to throw more resources at the “surface”. That is a mistake. Sound strategy is to throw your extra resources where you are succeeding.

Church people are continually falling into the temptation of throwing more and more effort into propping up activities and institutions which are failing. Let them go! Put, under God, your effort into what is succeeding, or into something new which will succeed.




So we developed a radically new model for Sunday School. It was exciting. It was different. It succeeded.

Be patient. It will be another two blogs before I get to give you the details!



Tuesday 9 September 2014

Morals blog: 9th Commandment - applied to facebook and tweets

Do Not Spread Rumours

As I said last post, the 9th Commandment “Do not give false testimony against your neighbour” was primarily about under-girding an honest, fair and effective justice system. It clearly also had an immediate application to what we might call “the court of public opinion”. People can be harmed, their livelihood stripped away, even killed by gossip and rumour.

Writing about the Bible's high view of proper law courts I did not quote chapter-and-verse because it seemed to me that on even a cursory reading of the Bible it was emerged as almost a “self evident truth”. However for the extension of the 9th Commandment to gossip and slander I shall provide a few quotes.

Exodus 23 combines both ideas as well as pointing out the temptation to “say what everyone else is saying” plus the twin temptations to play favourites either for or against the poor.:

Do not spread false reports. Do not help a guilty person by being a false witness. Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, and do not show favouritism to a poor person in a lawsuit.” … “Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits.”

In Mark 7.27 Jesus lists slander as one of the evil things that originate in a human heart and separate that person from God.

1 Corinthians 6 lists slander as one of the sins-of-habit that mark a person who will not enter heaven. This should scare us a great deal more than it does! It should trouble us all the more when a word search for “slander” in the New Testament turns up frequent calls for Christians to stop doing it – indicating that it was an active temptation in the young churches, and even fears as in 2 Corinthians 12:20 that it could be rife in a congregation.

So my understanding of New Testament teaching is that slander is a serious evil, yet one so attractive to our human nature that even (or possibly especially) in a close community-of-faith, it will be a constantly recurring problem.

It has certainly been my experience that gossip and slander are not only rife at every level in Christian churches and communities, but that it is one of the few bid sins that is seldom challenged.

Today's Christians, from the pew to the episcopate, seem to have cut the commands against gossip and slander out of their minds and out of their Bibles. We really need to change this!

In a society where even the churches, who aught to be guardians of morals, have so disastrously failed, it is not surprising that slander and false accusation are running rampant.

Small-town gossips did a lot of harm, but it was limited by propinquity. In a small secular community the effect of gossip was moderated by these two facts: you actually knew the target as a person and you had strict social conventions.

It is again “sociology 1.01” that in small towns people do gossip about each other but do not in general let that gossip influence their behaviour. The classic illustration is this: Two ladies are tearing apart the character of lady Number 3 with vicious gossip. Lady 3 approaches. They immediately break off their gossip, turn, smile, and greet her like a long lost sister. It is not hypocrisy, just beneficial social convention which has evolved so that humans can co-exist in groups, kicking in.

Of course there is a limit to what situations this convention can save. Lynch mobs, witch hunts, single mothers being hounded out of town are all historic reminders of that. However my point is only that in a small community social conventions gave some protection.

Also this benefit does not exist in religious communities and the like – in sociological terms what they foster is not “community” but “communion” which is a very different thing! They also make “The Faith” in whatever terms they understand it as paramount and so are prone to doing a great deal of evil in the name of protecting it!

Secondly in the village community, the target of gossip was a person you knew. This did not always save them . But often it did. The classic example is the person who says: “Jews may be (whatever the latest propaganda said) … but Isaac next door – well he is not like that!” You knew Isaac, he was a person.

Once again historically the failures of this are obvious – in Rwanda for instance pastors who were of the Hutu tribe betrayed and even themselves murdered men, women and children of their own congregations who were of the Tutsi tribe. Human evil is a truly frightening thing! So again my point is only that social proximity affords some protection.

Today in this “global village” we touch via technology people we do not know personally, and towards whom the old conventions of village behaviour do not apply. Little wonder slander is rearing its ugly head as a bis problem.

Technology has made it so easy to hurt a human being we do not know.

A person can be demonised in a face-book post. A touch of the finger is all it takes to “like” the slander on our page. Little wonder these can “go viral”.

The target is not a person we know – just a “thing” we want to hate. The target has no chance to tell us their side of the story: we have become judge, jury and executioner without even hearing counter evidence. This is a terrible travesty of justice.

Twitter can do the same. I don't do or read twitter. However from news reports there are people who see themselves as moulders of public opinion who tweet prolifically. Again rash, intemperate, unfair and possibly baseless slander trips easily off their fingertips. An instant of rage or even just pique and the tweet multiplies. Like a social version of a nuclear chain reaction these bombs go off.

This scourge of slander-on-steroids must be defeated.

The solution I put forward is a person-by-person choice for us not to do evil by “following the crowd in doing wrong”. Plus a person-by-person choice to radiate disapproval to those who do.


I likened tweets and facebook slander to nuclear chain reactions. In my younger days I did study nuclear engineering. A nuclear reactor can be shut down by introducing material that absorbs neutrons but does not multiply them and does not bounce them back into the ring. People can do that with gossip.