culture – Page 3 – Christ the Truth

Behind Closed Doors – On Porn and God 3

GlenOctober 24, 2013October 23, 20133 Comments

How does porn impact a young girl who discovers her father's stash? Michelle VanLoon writes about it in My Father The Porn Addict. This sentence struck me more than any other:

Porn taught me that the single most important thing to grown-ups was this mysterious world of fantasy, pain, and animalistic impulses too powerful to ignore.

Porn peddles a lie that becomes "the single most important thing" for those who buy into it. Actually it peddles many lies, but here's a prominent one: Porn tells us that love, respect and mutual honour are window dressing. Behind closed doors it's "fantasy, pain and animalistic impulses."

Loving commitment and kindness are like mating calls. The real business is mating. People might talk about relationships and fidelity, actually it's about glands and groans. On the surface it's love and trust, underneath it's power and gratification. And that's what's basic, primal, bubbling away.

To believe the lie is to feed it, to participate in it, to grow connected to it and then to see the world through its lens. Porn sacramentally reinforces the worshipper in that creed and the cycle spirals down.

When a Christian is embroiled in this other religion, what happens when they are told to 'clean up their private world'? It will likely be heard as the demand to 'put a lid on what's real.' Renouncing porn will be like agreeing to deny the truth, simply because the truth is too dangerous or shameful or powerful to acknowledge or indulge. And so the determined porn-denier will commit to living in the unreality of kindness, mutual service and self-control. All the while power and gratification throb away in heart and mind.

Combatting the lie will take more than a resolve to label pornography as 'harmful' or 'bad.' We need to know that it's also 'untrue.' And why is it untrue? Let's cut to the chase: God is as He is towards us. God is not different 'behind closed doors.' He does not display sacrificial love as window dressing. The Lamb is at the centre of the throne (Revelation 7:17). Push through to the deepest depths of God and you will find a faithful marital love that gives itself for the other. His gracious gospel offers are not mating calls to woo us while back at home He's all about power and gratification. No! He is love 'all the way down.'

Not every god will help you to conquer porn. There are many gods who are power and gratification pure and simple. And there are many Christian doctrines of God that offer a split-personality God - sacrificial in public, selfish in private.

But just imagine... what if, actually, the primeval passions that determine us are intimate, committed, self-denying deferrals to the other? What if it's respect and mutual love that are really bubbling away underneath? What if it's serving the other that drives this world, not using. What if giving and not getting is ultimate?

And I don't just mean, Let's escape mystically into some godly sphere where that love stuff is true. I don't mean, Let's affirm these religious truths (all the while knowing that 'the real world aint like that.') No, let's fling wide those doors that we're always closing because we imagine that darkness rules the roost. Let's declare that Jesus really is Lord. This really is Christ's universe. Light really is this world's driving force, not darkness. And all that other stuff is parasitic, corrupted, ugly, unnatural, ephemeral and passing away.

The lie of pornography will be unmasked and the bedrooms of Christians, both single and married, will be revolutionized when we see God aright. Behind closed doors there's not a throbbing, coercive power too dangerous to name. The primal urge is not grunting but grace.

Putting Halloween in Context 6

GlenSeptember 23, 2013September 23, 20136 Comments

When 10 of those asked me to do an evangelistic video for Halloween, I knew the dangers. Immediately I predicted a range of reactions reflecting the range of views on the subject.

When John Piper was asked about Halloween he summarized these varying approaches...

How to write something that satisfied all such groups?

Well, you can't. So I decided to write something for the friends of Christians - friends who would have little understanding of Halloween's origins or the gospel. That's the target audience. Therefore I'm not trying to convert Christians to 'trick or treating'. I am trying to engage trick-or-treaters (and their Facebooking parents) with the gospel.

Originally the video was going to be an animation with silhouetted figures playing the part of trick-or-treaters. We ran out of time for that and so decided to film it. On the day, I told the parents to bring children in whatever costumes they were comfortable with - a pirate or a spiderman would be perfect. I also brought some spare pumpkin costumes just in case. As it happened, the parents did a wonderful job on wardrobe and make-up as you can see. And my videographer and soundtrack artist were incredibly good at evoking the mock-horror.

What we ended up with was a really quite scary first minute of film that went beyond what I'd imagined with words and a basic animation. But I'm glad for how the film has turned out. I think that initial impact grabs folks and hopefully pulls them into the gospel material. Remember - this is for non-Christians. Non-Christians.

So I want to make clear, my intention is not to open the doors for Christians to go trick-or-treating. I want to open the doors for trick-or-treaters to come to Christ!

Interestingly I've had complaints in the other direction too. One person so far has thought I'm too hard on paganism. I think they made some good points. They asked Why do we "mock" these spiritual beliefs (witches, paganism, etc)? Is it really Christian to mock? Would we similarly 'mock' Muslims or Hindus? That complaint led to a really fruitful conversation. But I mention it just to say that the video is not at all trying to compromise with spiritual darkness but to unmask it.

Here's the bottom line for me: if you're not sold on the whole "mocking the darkness" angle (which I think is the true meaning of Halloween... see links below) then please don't get involved in Halloween just because we made a pretty video. I'm persuaded that Halloween can be engaged with positively, but if you're not persuaded then don't practice.

Romans 14:14 is the verse here:

I am convinced, being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean.

Just cos I made it rhyme, doesn't mean I'm right. If you're a Christian wondering what your approach to Halloween will be this year, our video hasn't solved anything for you. You can't short-cut the reading, thinking and praying part.

If you want some pointers in the direction of Christian engagement with Halloween, James Jordan is my top tip on a starting place. Peter Dray has also written a great paper (delivered first as an evangelistic talk). The Oxford Concise Dictionary of the Christian Church has good entries on "All Saints Eve" and "All Saints Day" (which deny that ancient Christians simply adopted pagan practices). CS Lewis's introduction to the Screwtape Letters gives sound advice on neither thinking too highly nor too little of evil powers and gives a great defence of holy mockery. He quotes Luther:

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” (Martin Luther)

Alan Rudnick writes from an American perspective and Steve Utley from a British one. Michael Spencer and Anderson Rearick might be a step too far for some, but they're fascinating for showing how attitudes have changed on this issue.

If you're after a video for how Christians should engage Halloween, then check out Ed Drew's video. Our video is designed to reach non-Christians. And to that end I ask that you get busy sharing it towards the end of October. If we really want to oppose Satan then, as Luther says "Christians should face the devil with the Word of God."

Where will it all end? 4

glenscrivMay 28, 20134 Comments

Last week someone asked me where I thought it would all end? All these adaptations the church seems to be making to culture. We used to get hung up on keeping Sunday special, but who is bothered anymore? It was only 20 years ago that the Church of England allowed women priests, but who can deny that women bishops will shortly follow? Right now, much ado is being made about gay marriage, but won't that also seem like an outdated scruple in years to come. Isn't the trend basically one of distinctives gradually eroded away? And all those conservative Christians who have fought so hard, won't they just watch their children accommodate themselves to the very compromises they so feared?

Trouble is... that predictive model is based on the very thing that is shifting most fundamentally. It's based on the idea of 'Christian Britain' and a church that can expect (and demand!) the state to be at least Christian-ish. But it seems plain to me that this is the one thing that's really changing. Or rather, this is the reality that's most obviously being revealed in all the other changes. The culture is not Christian-ish. It's not even Christian-ish-ish. The church doesn't have the political voice it wants to have. And shouting louder is not helping. It's basically communicating peripheral issues as our central message (that's what's being heard anyway).

But what if we extrapolate from the real change that's occurring - the realization that the Christian vision of work/rest, men/women, sex and sexuality really isn't the world's? What then? Maybe then we'd see church as the place where true rest is enjoyed, true gender relations modeled and true enjoyment of singleness and marriage nurtured. And we'll see the world as a place that almost must find the way of Christ baffling and wrong.

If we follow that trajectory then, yes, we'll have to accept persecution as part of the deal. But I'm pretty sure we all signed up to that at the outset, and, on the upside, it means that we're not at all destined to ever-increasing compromise. Nor are we doomed to fight all our battles for peripheral issues like sex. In fact we might actually find our churches modelling a counter-culture more distinctive than ever. Meanwhile, those who focus the battle on Westminster may find that they are being just as defined by the culture as 'the compromisers' (even if negatively).

I'm no kind of culture-vulture and I couldn't spot a political trend if it tap-danced on my face. But it seems to me that whatever trajectory we're on, it does not need to end in a loss of Christian distinctives. Instead in might be the birth of some real distinctives. What's more it may help us re-assign resources to the true front line - the church - as we re-centre ourselves on our true mission - proclaiming Jesus.

Cantankerous Dawkins 3

glenscrivApril 22, 20133 Comments

Yesterday, Richard Dawkins drew much criticism for the following tweet:

Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 21, 2013

Andrew Brown of the Guardian tells of the fall-out.

Seems to me one response would be to point to this Dawkins tweet from last month:

"Something from nothing" sounds absurd? You can't do physics by common sense. If you could, we wouldn't need physicists.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 21, 2013

What's good for the goose is good for the gander I'd have thought. The supernatural (for want of a better short-hand) might seem absurd to the naturalist, but, well, it would. But you can't do theology by common sense either - and certainly not naturalistic common sense!

Anyway, perhaps the best response is just to list some of Dawkins' other clangers from the last few weeks and let them speak for themselves...

[now deleted] What kind of person throws chewing gum in the streets, where it sticks to shoes? What kind of person chews gum in the first place?

Greetings to all atheists. But please, not so many athiests, aethists or aetheists. Greek theos: god. Hence theist. Hence a-theist.

I re-tweet for a reason. I know not everybody likes it. They are free to unfollow.

Comparisons often made of Jesus with Horus, Dionysus, Krishna etc. Any real scholars out there confirm each one? pic.twitter.com/IuN1u7McNq

then, when called on such tired and lazy comparisons...

Was it seriously not obvious that I posted that set of other gods because I was SCEPTICAL of the alleged similarities to Jesus?

If you're used to the obscurantist smokescreens of religion, the sudden shock of the unambiguously clear voice of reason can SEEM aggressive

Dear Americans, please understand that "grade" as in "7th grade" is not part of the English language. Please state the child's AGE in years

People outside America truly don't know what "7th grade" means. In Britain we've "Year 10" but don't expect others to know what that means.

If you only care about communicating to Americans, "7th grade" is fine. But there's this obscure little place called The Rest Of The World

I'm NOT arguing for British English. "Year 10" not part of the language either, which is why I wouldn't use it in an international medium.

"Hit a home run" great metaphor, understood internationally. But "7th grade" conveys precision. Don't you WANT to be understood outside US?

Struggling with London tube notice: delays because "customer" taken ill on train earlier in day. Sorry for sick passenger, but why DELAYS?

The True Myth 6

glenscrivFebruary 17, 20136 Comments

During mission week at Falmouth CU we showed The Dark Knight Rises. I was going to give a short talk at the end but we had some technical problems halfway through so I gave the talk in the middle instead. Thankfully it didn't affect the talk too much since it wasn't based on the plot of Batman but on the concept of myths.

Audio

Slides

JRR TOLKEIN: ‘The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories… But this story has entered History... There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.”

CS LEWIS: “The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others but with the tremendous difference that it really happened.”

Six brief thoughts on Francis Spufford’s “Unapologetic” 5

glenscrivJanuary 17, 20135 Comments

This might only make sense for those who have read or are reading the book... but I don't have much time so I'm not going to spell things out too much.

Read this extract from chapter one to get an idea of the book.

The whole 'emotional sense' thing is a brilliant idea. And it's wonderfully written. Here are 6 thoughts:

1) The book connects every time it's about sin and Jesus. It floats away on Spufford's soaring prose the rest of the time.

2) Spufford continually speaks of sin as the "human potential to f*#k things up". That's very well put. If I was Spufford, I'd object to any priggishness about the term. 'Transgression' and 'iniquity' don't describe transgressions and iniquities the way we experience them today. "F#@k ups" do. Jesus meets us here or not at all.

3) "Yeshua" - his Jesus chapter - is the stand-out. (Surprise, surprise).

4) Jesus shines. Spufford's "God", on the other hand seems simply to be a "Shining" and so, ironically, he doesn't.

5) Spufford is strong on the uncontainable, unreachable, beautiful-yet-bonkers teaching of Jesus. On the issues of forgiveness, generosity, worry and non-violence, Spufford captures the irrepressible overflow of the kingdom. These sections are very refreshing to read, but...

6) ...Spufford doesn't follow this same trajectory when he treats Jesus' teaching on sexuality and hell. He hides it away saying, on the one hand, that Jesus speaks very little about sex and, on the other, that the church doesn't really believe in hell anymore, so... Well, so Spufford should have treated Christ's teaching here, the way he treats it on every other subject: bonkers-but-beautiful, demanding more from us than could possibly lie within us - and, at the same time, speaking of a Kingdom and King in which these things are and can be.

Spufford points attractively towards a fruitful line of gospel engagement. Let's pray others follow.

Living Beyond the End of the World 7

glenscrivDecember 21, 20127 Comments

The Mayan Calendar has run out, giving tweet-fodder to wits all over the world. Some of the better ones:

People are making apocalypse jokes like there's no tomorrow.

— Daniel Maier (@danielmaier) December 21, 2012

Sorry everyone, running a bit late.

— Mayan Apocalypse (@kabooooooooom) December 21, 2012

And perhaps my favourite...

Staring out my window at the post-apocalyptic hellscape, watching mindless creatures bent on consumption dragging themselves along.

— S. Joel Garver (@sjgarver) December 21, 2012

What's it like to live beyond the end of the world? What's it like to find yourself on the other side of judgement day unscathed?

Well Christians ought to know. We are 8th day people. Through Christ we've been taken through the history of the old world, beyond the limit of the old Adam and into a whole new calendar.

From creation, the week has proclaimed God's work in giving life (cf Exodus 20:8-11; Deut 5:12-15). Day 6 is the pinnacle of His work - the Day of Man. Day 7 is the Day of Completion. On this day, the finished work of giving life is celebrated and rest is brought.

When Jesus died on the 6th day, He was summing up Man and the death he must die ("on the day you eat of it you will surely die" - Gen 2:17). On the 7th He rested in the tomb. The 8th day was the first day of a whole new week, a whole new world.

And ever since, the Lord's people have been 8th day people, celebrating His resurrection into new creation life. We don't live like old covenant people, with the day of rest and completion yet future. We have no work to do in order to arrive at the end of the world. Christ has taken us through our death and judgement - through the End and out into a New Beginning.

"Worldly" people are 6th day people. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we're dead.

"Religious" people are 7th day people. Appearing in their own person at the End and hoping to be let through.

Christians are 8th day people. We've burst through to the other side. The old calendar is gone. The old code is gone. The old man is gone. There's nothing ahead to judge or condemn us. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Fear and Faith: Derren Brown undone in 60 seconds by his own subject 57

glenscrivNovember 25, 201257 Comments

I'm 9 days late to this, but last Friday Derren Brown's "Fear and Faith" aired - watch here.

It was 10 minutes of fascinating viewing padded out by some seriously underwhelming logic by way of explanation.

The show centres on the challenge Brown sets himself to elicit "a religious experience" from an atheist. To be fair the emotional "conversion", when it came, was indeed dramatic. In a candlelit church, Derren spoke to atheist Natalie and through various NLP-type techniques evoked feelings of father-hunger, a sense of awe at the mystery of the world, regrets over her past, that kind of thing. Having anchored those feelings and established some triggers, Derren left and - BOOM - the "conversion" was dramatic. There were tears and exclamations of both sorrow and joy, almost simultaneously. Alone with the candles and the stained-glass images, "I'm sorry"s came flooding out along with "I love you"s. It was a salutary warning of how prone we are to emotional manipulation. This woman was an avowed atheist and her discussion with Derren contained no "God-talk" whatsover. He simply spoke about feelings of love, awe and regret in a "religious" setting and his techniques produced a "conversion" the envy of many an evangelist.

So lesson number one - beware Christian evangelists using manipulative methods!

But then lesson number two has got to be: Beware atheist evangelists too. Because Derren's preaching was seriously misleading. Throughout the programme he put two and two together and made 600. First came the trivially true assertions: "religious experience can be explained by psychology". In the same vein he asks "Can our experience of religion be explained by psychology alone?" And he expects the answer yes.

Well of course the answer is yes, Derren! Of course "our experience of religion" can be explained by psychology! Even psychology alone. My experience of falling in love with my wife could be explained in entirely psychological terms. And if Derren did it, I'd be all ears. I'm sure there'd be insights - certain needs from my childhood met in 'some sort of spouse figure', yes, yes. All useful, all true. And, I suppose, such psychology might - at another level of explanation - be put down to biology, and biology reduced to chemistry and chemistry explained by physics... or something. I'd be genuinely interested in all such analyses. But...

A) the further we "progress" into those materialistic explanations, the less satisfying they are as an account of what is, irreducibly, a personal experience.

And, crucially....

B) the claim that, because there might be a perfectly satisfying psychological explanation, my wife doesn't exist needs unmasking as the rank idiocy that it is.

Yet Brown's whole show is set up on precisely this absurd foundation. Derren says he's out to prove that "religious belief comes from us, not from the existence of the divine". Which is exactly parallel to saying my love for my wife comes from me and not from the existence of Emma. Well of course it comes from me - my religious and my marital experiences come from me. But what's that got to do with the truth or otherwise of the object of those feelings??

David Bentley Hart nails this in Atheist Delusions as he turns his withering wit upon Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell". Dennett, a philosopher and one of the four horsemen of the Atheist apocalypse, similarly attempts to describe religion as an entirely natural phenomenon. Against this Hart writes

Not only does [Dennett's project] pose no challenge to faith, it is in fact perfectly compatible with what most developed faiths already teach regarding religion. Of course religion is a natural phenomenon. Who would be so foolish as to deny that...

...It does not logically follow that simply because religion is natural it cannot become a vehicle of divine truth, or that it is not in some sense oriented towards ultimate reality (as, according to Christian tradition, all natural things are)...

...As for Dennett's amazing discovery that the "natural desire for God" is in fact a desire for God that is natural, it amounts to a revolution not of thought, only of syntax. (David Bentley-Hart, Atheist Delusions, p7-8)

How else would you measure a religious experience anyway, if not via natural methods? What else could provoke such an experience, if not natural phenomena? The God who meets us in a Jewish carpenter, a library of ancient texts, men and women of faith, water, wheat and wine... His encounters with us do not happen in the 7th dimension. He meets us where we are. (That's the meaning of Christmas by the way). But since He meets us where we are then He meets us in naturally measurable and naturally explicable ways. Neither Dennett nor Derren will have any objections from Christians at that point.

Where we might raise an eyebrow is during the galactic leaps of faith they employ to tell their naturalistic story. Derren speaks of pareidolia whereby the human brain naturally sees personal significance in randomness - seeing "a man in the moon" when really there are only craters and shadows. This is, according to Derren, "probably the biggest contributor to religious belief" in our evolutionary story.

Notice the irony though. Derren is trying to tell you a story - the naturalistic evolution of all things, including belief. His story is all about going from randomness to personality. And now, here we are, persons at the end of a random process, telling other persons not to read personal significance into randomness. Eh?

The only way you could take that move seriously would be to reduce everything personal down to randomness. That sounds bleak, but Derren makes other such moves in just that direction. He happily gives accounts of morality and religion entirely based on the survival benefits they bestow in the grand evolutionary scheme. But if he were consistent I suggest he should also add love, beauty and truth to that same heap. And at that stage of course the whole endeavour collapses.

Which is very depressing. And the show was indeed very depressing. But for me it was saved by the last few minutes in which Derren interviewed Natalie. He revealed that her conversion was all a psychological trick - the emotions were real, but God was not, yada yada. Yet in my view her response, completely unscripted, torpedoed Derren's whole enterprise. And I think he knew it.

When asked whether she now viewed her experience in the church differently, she said

It has added a kind of artificial element to it for me now... But inducing an emotional reaction to something, if it’s through external influences is always artificial in a way... If I’m listening to an amazing piece of music, that’s an emotional stimulus that’s come from an artificial source...

Amen Natalie! Preach it. All emotions come from somewhere beyond us. To explain the feeling doesn't explain away everything to be said about the experience. At this point Derren talked right across her and didn't let her speak again. He forcefully asserted...

The emotions are real, that’s the point. It’s just important to me that you don’t feel it has to be attached to something supernatural or superstitious. Because it wasn’t. And it’s not even like it came from me, it certainly didn’t come from God, it came from you. They were perfectly real emotions, they are things you can carry with you for the rest of your life but you don’t have to attach them to a superstitious belief.

Carry the emotions Natalie - that's Derren's take home message. Keep hold of the emotions. Emotions that can be conjured up in 15 minutes by a TV showman. Emotions based entirely on our ancient and selfish survival instincts. Emotions which probably reduce down to randomness anyway.

And don't ever ask yourself why you live in a universe in which father-hunger, awe and regret can trigger such feelings. Boil it down to selfishness in the struggle for survival, that'll satisfy. That and the emotions. Induced for entertainment. As a trick of the mind. Take that away with you Natalie. Cos that's all this evangelist can offer.

Five minutes on the bible and slavery 9

glenscrivNovember 21, 20129 Comments

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson introduced the Declaration of Independence with these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This bold and attractive vision of human flourishing is articulated in the context of some very specific views of God, of humanity and the good life. Yet without this framework it's difficult to imagine anything less self-evident than the truth that "all men are created equal." If you divorce this conviction from its theological foundations, it's one of the most instantly falsifiable "self-evident" truths going! When you look at the mass of humanity born in such differing circumstances, with such differing opportunities and capacities, who on earth are the "we" who are able to see "equality" when all that's really "self-evident" is endemic inequality?

The answer is that the "we" who hold this vision of equality have soaked for long centuries in a view of God, the world and humanity which has been completely alien to the rest of thinking people.

Take Aristotle in Politics:

For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule...

Aristotle took inequality to be the thing "self-evident." He repeatedly called slaves "living tools" and was quite comfortable with that arrangement. Same with Plato:

...nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. (Gorgias)

According to these brilliant pagan minds, equality is not taught by nature. The very opposite. Whatever "human nature" was, clearly some humans conformed closer to the ideal than others. So who could object if some were given more human "rights" than others?

The point is this: if observations of "nature" were all we had to go by, who on earth could disagree with the inequitable status quo? Of course nature produces more powerful and less powerful creatures, superiors and inferiors. If nature is our teacher why not endorse a class of rulers and a class of the ruled? Why not support the inequalities which nature clearly intends? Why fight it? On what grounds? With what justification? From where could you get an alternative vision of humanity? The only humanity we've ever observed has been one of profound inequalities!

Thus it seemed absolutely right to have a perilously steep hierarchy of being - the emporer at the top, the slaves at the bottom, with every subject knowing their place. Who could possibly object?

Except that the ancient Scriptures kept speaking of another way. The God who gets dirt under His fingernails forming humanity (Genesis 2), who wants to walk with His creatures in the cool of the day (Genesis 3). The Saviour who would fight for us and take the blow (Genesis 3:15). The Son who would give Himself in atoning death (Genesis 22). The LORD who is Servant and Sacrifice (see Isaiah 42; 49; 50; 53).

And then He comes to a humble "servant" (Luke 1:48) as a humble servant (Philippians 2:5-11). The whole pyramid is subverted as God becomes a Slave! And He becomes a Slave so that we, the slaves of sin and Satan, might become sons and daughters in His royal family. He descends to the depths and raises us to the heights so that now we might all feast at the same table - royals and commoners, masters and bond-servants.

And through this divine stooping, Christ shows us a radically different way of assessing "human nature." The Son "became flesh" - just common or garden humanity. He became a Jewish pauper with nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him (Isaiah 53:2). Whatever might be deemed "ideal humanity" had nothing to do with the properties inherent in it. The Man Jesus was valuable not because of the attributes of His humanity but only because the Son had chosen this flesh to be. Thus a Christian account of "human nature" does not look to the properties and capacities of particular persons but declares that humans as humans are inherently valuable. From there it's a hop, skip and a jump to declaring their "unalienable rights".

But wait - doesn't the bible (particularly the OT) endorse slavery? Well distinguish Hebrew slavery from Greco-Roman practice and distinguish both from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries. Hebrew slavery was nothing like that which Wilberforce fought.

Certainly the Western mind has difficulty with the idea of selling oneself into slavery for a limited period (we prefer other forms of economic slavery), but those OT provisions were always temporary arrangements. In everyone's lifetime Jubilee was always just around the corner (Leviticus 25) - and the great hope was the Messiah who would bring ultimate and eternal liberation (Isaiah 61; Luke 4:16-21).

In the NT, Paul counselled slaves (in this new Greco-Roman context) to seek their freedom if they could (1 Cor 7:21-24) and declared slave-trading to be sinful (1 Tim 1:10) thereby cutting the jugular of the whole practice. But really, it was the intellectual revolution of the gospel that was so much more subversive than any 'revolt of the slaves' could be.

And it's a revolution that we need to continue today. It's estimated that there are 27 million slaves in the world right now and so often it is Christians who continue to be at the forefront of the fight against human-trafficking. Why? Because Christians actually have an anthropology that treats each human with "unalienable rights" rather than as "living tools". Anyone who seeks to take some high-ground on the issue of slavery must produce an account of human nature that will actually protect the weak and the vulnerable from being used. But on what grounds will they justify such a stand?

I live in a country that kills 200 000 of the weakest members of our species every year because of the will of the strong. Our culture can claim no high ground in protecting the "unalienable rights" of all people. We have our own hierarchies based on the properties and capacities of individuals and we discriminate with extreme prejudice. If we want real equality we must return to the only true foundation: the Master who became Slave.

Tag: culture